UCREL Corpus Research Seminar

The UCREL Corpus Research Seminar (CRS) is a forum for all staff, visiting academics, and postgraduate research students interested in corpus-based research in any area of linguistics. CRS is run by UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language), a research centre between the Department of Linguistics and English Language and the School of Computing and Communications.

CRS meetings offer an opportunity to present work in progress and receive helpful feedback, discuss relevant research, approaches and methods, get experience in using corpus interfaces and tools, and stay up to date with corpus-based research at Lancaster University. We welcome anyone who is a newcomer to this exciting and growing area of linguistics. We welcome presentations from researchers of other departments and universities.

On this site, along with general information, you will find a list of upcoming seminars and an archive of past seminars. If you have any suggestions of things to add to the site, then please get in touch.

In 2018/19 CRS meetings will be on Thursdays at 3pm during term time, unless otherwise indicated.

Notifications of seminars are sent to the UCREL Mailing List, sign up if you would like to receive them and other UCREL related messages. You can also follow us on Twitter, where we post updates on upcoming seminars.

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If you need more information or want to give a presentation, please contact one of the CRS organisers:

Mathew Gillings (m.gillings@lancaster.ac.uk)
Andrew Moore (a.moore@lancaster.ac.uk)
Alexander Reinhold (a.reinhold1@lancaster.ac.uk)
Andressa Rodrigues Gomide (a.rodriguesgomide@lancaster.ac.uk)

The previous website has an archive of past seminars.

We acknowledge the following funding for external speakers: CASS and UCREL research centres, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Department of Linguistics and English Language and the School of Computing and Communications.

The UCREL Corpus Research Seminars this academic year (2018/19) will be on Thursdays 3pm-4pm during term time, unless otherwise indicated, please check our upcoming page for the time and location of any future presenations. If you would like to give a talk or have a suggestion for an external speaker to invite, then please get in touch.

Upcoming seminars

Next seminar

Week 10

Thursday 13th December 2018

3:00-4:00pm

LUMS LT 5

Colloquialisation of academic British English: Evidence from the Written BNC2014

Abi Hawtin

CASS, Lancaster University

Abstract

Is academic British English becoming more colloquial? Evidence from the Written BNC2014

Leech (2002:72) defines colloquialisation as "a tendency for features of the conversational spoken language to infiltrate and spread in the written language". In this presentation I will discuss the results of a study which investigates whether academic British English has become more colloquial since the 1990s. I use some early data from the Written BNC2014, and compare this to data from the BNC1994, to investigate whether linguistic features associated with colloquialisation have changed in frequency between the two corpora. I find that in some respects academic British English has certainly become more colloquial since the 1990s, although this pattern is not straightforward. It seems that academic books have changed much more in the direction of colloquialisation theory than academic journal articles, and that genres of writing with a 'social' aspect are showing more changes in line with colloquialisation theory than the 'hard' science genres. I also consider whether these results can tell us anything about the colloquialisation of language in general.

Leech, G. (2002). Recent grammatical change in English: Data, description, theory. In K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg (Eds.), Advances in Corpus Linguistics. Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23), Göteborg 22-26 May 2002 (pp. 61-81), Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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