Corpora, Discourse and Society
BAAL Corpus Linguistics Special Interest Group Annual Worskhop
Wednesday 13th November 2019
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University
The event will take place in Bowland Hall on Lancaster University campus. This is marked BLH on this map: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/maps/campus-map.pdf
Registration
Please register through the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/corpora-discourse-and-society-tickets-72943621335?ref=estw
Programme
09.00 – 09.30 Registration and welcome
09.30 – 10.30 Plenary 1: Lesley Jeffries Beyond the Concordance Lines: making corpus methods work for discourse analysis
10.30 – 10.50 Coffee break
10.50 – 11.20 Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe Language of conflict: cross-linguistic corpus-assisted comparative discourse study
11.20 – 11.50 Isobelle Clarke and Mark McGlashan Online discourses of toxic masculinity
11.50 – 12.20 Mel Evans Literary Lifespans: corpus perspectives on linguistic repertoires in early modern drama
12.20 – 13.30 Lunch and posters
13.30 – 14.30 Plenary 2: Tony McEnery The UK, Europe and the path to Brexit - the long view: Europe in two centuries of British newspapers.
14.30 – 15.00 Duygu Candarli, Robbie Love and Alice Deignan Rhetorical variation in teachers’ lesson presentations across Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3
15.00 – 15.30 Michael Handford ‘The Russians came along with a bucketful of Roubles’: National identity markers in narratives
in business meetings
15.30 – 16.00 Coffee break
16.00 – 16.30 Lexi Webster “Something from Nothing”: Towards a corpus-informed cultural political economy analysis
16.30 – 17.00 Susan Whitbread Corpus-assisted discourse analysis of opposition to GMOs in food and agriculture
17.00 – 17.30 Caterina Guardamagna, Victorina González-Díaz and Ursula Kania “We talk of birthright”: A corpus assisted discourse analysis of Early Modern representations of ‘citizenship’ (1550-1700)
17.30 – 17.45 Wrap up and close
Posters
Presenter Title
Ondřej Molnár Textual Rhetoric of News Stories
Charlotte-Rose Kennedy The representations of the People’s Vote March in The Express and The Independent
Luke Collins The discourse of PrEP in the UK Press (2014-2019)
Gillian Smith Teacher directives and pupils responses in SEN classrooms: insights from corpus methods
Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) in the Special Educational Needs classroom: a
corpus analysis of small group literacy teaching.
Lorrae Fox Examiner and candidate collocation use in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
Note: This list is provisional and more posters may be added!
Plenary abstracts
Beyond the Concordance Lines: making corpus methods work for discourse analysis
Lesley Jeffries University of Huddersfield
Though corpus methods have long been just one part of my repertoire of linguistic methodologies, in recent years I have focused on how to take the advances in corpus linguistics and make them work for me. As a linguist interested in textual meaning, I have become fascinated by how individual lexical items in particular can be buffeted by the relatively local events of socio-political life – in both time and space – in order to observe what I have sometimes called ‘emergent meaning’.
One of the consequences of the ubiquity of our modern (traditional and social) media is that words can take on specific and sometimes very powerful roles in the public debates that affect the ways in which we are governed and how our society works. Identifying and tracing the way in which such short-term and local semantic change happens – and the potential effects it may have – is my general research objective in this work. My work with colleagues (Brian Walker, Dan McIntyre and Matt Evans) has taken the investigation of what we are calling ‘sociopolitical keywords’ as the testing ground for how to bridge the gap between the techniques of data manipulation provided by corpus software and the need to scrutinize the co-text in detail in order to see how the word is used.
Whilst the research strengths of corpus methods (replicability, rigour, transparency) are evident, though possibly not always as objective as claimed, the same cannot be said of discourse analysis, whose aim is so broad that such expectations buckle under the weight of contextual information. In this talk, therefore, I’d like to explore the challenges in corpus-based work once the concordance lines have been produced. Drawing on my theoretical work in critical stylistics, I will propose one way in which these challenges can be met.
The UK, Europe and the path to Brexit - the long view: Europe in two centuries of British newspapers
Tony McEnery Lancaster University
When the UK voted to exit the European Union in 2016 many tried to understand the event. Opinion polls, the analysis of voting patterns, studies of the press in the run up to the vote, the role of social media and machine learning all came to prominence as people and organizations tried to understand what was an unexpected outcome for many.
In the research presented in this paper, undertaken with Helen Baker and Vaclav Brezina, we approached this question with a different mindset. Much of the work we have done in the past has been focused on exploring the development of attitudes and ideas, as reflected in language, over long stretches of time. We believe that in taking this approach we can start to understand long term trends that give rise to specific, notable, events.
Brexit was not the result of one or two months of campaigning. Brexit needs to be understood in the long term. Only by doing so can we begin to answer questions such as ‘How did the UK vote for Brexit when no major political party in the UK has ever campaigned to leave the EU?’, ‘How and why did attitudes to the EU change in the UK between it voting to stay in the EU in 1975 and voting to leave in 2016?’ and ‘What were the key events over time that led to Brexit?’.
In this talk, we will approach questions such as these in two ways. After a brief review of the history of British engagement with what is now called the EU, we will start by summarising what researchers in academic disciplines such as History and Politics say have been the major arguments for and against staying in the EU over time. We will follow that up by a study of one newspaper, from the 1960s to the present – The Times. We have access to all of the machine readable copies of the newspaper – over three billion words were published by it in this period alone. Using techniques pioneered by linguists to look at and start to comprehend data on this scale using computers, we will explore the totality of this data to look at how attitudes to the EU shifted over time and link those to historical events. By doing this we will start to show, for the first time, on a very large scale how British attitudes to the EU developed over time, as viewed through the prism of one very influential newspaper. In doing so we will also reflect on the claims made by the smaller scale, qualitative research, undertaken by Historians and Political Science researchers while gaining a deeper understanding of the drivers of Brexit.
Full programme with all abstracts can be downloaded here
Travel and accomodation
The easiest way for most to get to Lancaster will be by train. The nearest station is Lancaster. For those intending to spend a night or two, there is accomodation available on campus, including the Lancaster House Hotel. The latter is a little pricey, but there are also plenty of hotels in Lancaster town centre which can be found using Google and in all the usual places. Buses run regularly from the town centre to the campus (for details see here). Taxis from the centre of Lancaster are a little quicker and cost approximately £10.
Fees*
· Standard (non-BAAL members): £40
· Standard (BAAL members): £35
· Student (non-BAAL members): £30
· Concessionary fee (BAAL students or unwaged BAAL members): £25
*Fees include registration, tea/coffee and lunch.
Please direct any queries to Gavin Brookes (g.j.brookes@lancaster.ac.uk).
BAAL Corpus Linguistics Special Interest Group Annual Worskhop
Wednesday 13th November 2019
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University
The event will take place in Bowland Hall on Lancaster University campus. This is marked BLH on this map: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/maps/campus-map.pdf
Registration
Please register through the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/corpora-discourse-and-society-tickets-72943621335?ref=estw
Programme
09.00 – 09.30 Registration and welcome
09.30 – 10.30 Plenary 1: Lesley Jeffries Beyond the Concordance Lines: making corpus methods work for discourse analysis
10.30 – 10.50 Coffee break
10.50 – 11.20 Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe Language of conflict: cross-linguistic corpus-assisted comparative discourse study
11.20 – 11.50 Isobelle Clarke and Mark McGlashan Online discourses of toxic masculinity
11.50 – 12.20 Mel Evans Literary Lifespans: corpus perspectives on linguistic repertoires in early modern drama
12.20 – 13.30 Lunch and posters
13.30 – 14.30 Plenary 2: Tony McEnery The UK, Europe and the path to Brexit - the long view: Europe in two centuries of British newspapers.
14.30 – 15.00 Duygu Candarli, Robbie Love and Alice Deignan Rhetorical variation in teachers’ lesson presentations across Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3
15.00 – 15.30 Michael Handford ‘The Russians came along with a bucketful of Roubles’: National identity markers in narratives
in business meetings
15.30 – 16.00 Coffee break
16.00 – 16.30 Lexi Webster “Something from Nothing”: Towards a corpus-informed cultural political economy analysis
16.30 – 17.00 Susan Whitbread Corpus-assisted discourse analysis of opposition to GMOs in food and agriculture
17.00 – 17.30 Caterina Guardamagna, Victorina González-Díaz and Ursula Kania “We talk of birthright”: A corpus assisted discourse analysis of Early Modern representations of ‘citizenship’ (1550-1700)
17.30 – 17.45 Wrap up and close
Posters
Presenter Title
Ondřej Molnár Textual Rhetoric of News Stories
Charlotte-Rose Kennedy The representations of the People’s Vote March in The Express and The Independent
Luke Collins The discourse of PrEP in the UK Press (2014-2019)
Gillian Smith Teacher directives and pupils responses in SEN classrooms: insights from corpus methods
Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) in the Special Educational Needs classroom: a
corpus analysis of small group literacy teaching.
Lorrae Fox Examiner and candidate collocation use in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
Note: This list is provisional and more posters may be added!
Plenary abstracts
Beyond the Concordance Lines: making corpus methods work for discourse analysis
Lesley Jeffries University of Huddersfield
Though corpus methods have long been just one part of my repertoire of linguistic methodologies, in recent years I have focused on how to take the advances in corpus linguistics and make them work for me. As a linguist interested in textual meaning, I have become fascinated by how individual lexical items in particular can be buffeted by the relatively local events of socio-political life – in both time and space – in order to observe what I have sometimes called ‘emergent meaning’.
One of the consequences of the ubiquity of our modern (traditional and social) media is that words can take on specific and sometimes very powerful roles in the public debates that affect the ways in which we are governed and how our society works. Identifying and tracing the way in which such short-term and local semantic change happens – and the potential effects it may have – is my general research objective in this work. My work with colleagues (Brian Walker, Dan McIntyre and Matt Evans) has taken the investigation of what we are calling ‘sociopolitical keywords’ as the testing ground for how to bridge the gap between the techniques of data manipulation provided by corpus software and the need to scrutinize the co-text in detail in order to see how the word is used.
Whilst the research strengths of corpus methods (replicability, rigour, transparency) are evident, though possibly not always as objective as claimed, the same cannot be said of discourse analysis, whose aim is so broad that such expectations buckle under the weight of contextual information. In this talk, therefore, I’d like to explore the challenges in corpus-based work once the concordance lines have been produced. Drawing on my theoretical work in critical stylistics, I will propose one way in which these challenges can be met.
The UK, Europe and the path to Brexit - the long view: Europe in two centuries of British newspapers
Tony McEnery Lancaster University
When the UK voted to exit the European Union in 2016 many tried to understand the event. Opinion polls, the analysis of voting patterns, studies of the press in the run up to the vote, the role of social media and machine learning all came to prominence as people and organizations tried to understand what was an unexpected outcome for many.
In the research presented in this paper, undertaken with Helen Baker and Vaclav Brezina, we approached this question with a different mindset. Much of the work we have done in the past has been focused on exploring the development of attitudes and ideas, as reflected in language, over long stretches of time. We believe that in taking this approach we can start to understand long term trends that give rise to specific, notable, events.
Brexit was not the result of one or two months of campaigning. Brexit needs to be understood in the long term. Only by doing so can we begin to answer questions such as ‘How did the UK vote for Brexit when no major political party in the UK has ever campaigned to leave the EU?’, ‘How and why did attitudes to the EU change in the UK between it voting to stay in the EU in 1975 and voting to leave in 2016?’ and ‘What were the key events over time that led to Brexit?’.
In this talk, we will approach questions such as these in two ways. After a brief review of the history of British engagement with what is now called the EU, we will start by summarising what researchers in academic disciplines such as History and Politics say have been the major arguments for and against staying in the EU over time. We will follow that up by a study of one newspaper, from the 1960s to the present – The Times. We have access to all of the machine readable copies of the newspaper – over three billion words were published by it in this period alone. Using techniques pioneered by linguists to look at and start to comprehend data on this scale using computers, we will explore the totality of this data to look at how attitudes to the EU shifted over time and link those to historical events. By doing this we will start to show, for the first time, on a very large scale how British attitudes to the EU developed over time, as viewed through the prism of one very influential newspaper. In doing so we will also reflect on the claims made by the smaller scale, qualitative research, undertaken by Historians and Political Science researchers while gaining a deeper understanding of the drivers of Brexit.
Full programme with all abstracts can be downloaded here
Travel and accomodation
The easiest way for most to get to Lancaster will be by train. The nearest station is Lancaster. For those intending to spend a night or two, there is accomodation available on campus, including the Lancaster House Hotel. The latter is a little pricey, but there are also plenty of hotels in Lancaster town centre which can be found using Google and in all the usual places. Buses run regularly from the town centre to the campus (for details see here). Taxis from the centre of Lancaster are a little quicker and cost approximately £10.
Fees*
· Standard (non-BAAL members): £40
· Standard (BAAL members): £35
· Student (non-BAAL members): £30
· Concessionary fee (BAAL students or unwaged BAAL members): £25
*Fees include registration, tea/coffee and lunch.
Please direct any queries to Gavin Brookes (g.j.brookes@lancaster.ac.uk).
