UCREL Corpus Research Seminar

University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language

Computing & Communications | Linguistics and English Language

Starting with verbs: complementary methods for the corpus-assisted discourse analysis of HEAR.

Alison Sealey & Emma Franklin

LAEL, Lancaster University

We are both interested in the ways nonhuman animals are represented in language. One research theme concerns patterns in how discourse represents animals' perceptive and communicative capacities. A core verb relevant to both is HEAR, and we use corpus evidence to help answer the following questions: What are humans reported to 'hear', in general and in relation to sounds made by animals? What are animals reported to 'hear'?

In our presentation, we will explain the different corpora, corpus tools and analytical approaches we have used to generate answers to these questions. These include both familiar reference corpora (BNC, enTenTen), methods and tools (concordances using AntConc, SketchEngine), as well as a topic-specific corpus compiled for the project 'People', 'Products', 'Pests' and 'Pets'*, and the Corpus Pattern Analysis method* that was originally developed for lexicography, but is adapted here for discourse analysis.

Week 27 2016/2017

Thursday 8th June 2017
3:00-4:00pm

Furness LT 2

*'People', 'Products', 'Pests' and 'Pets': The Discursive Representation of Animals. http://animaldiscourse.wordpress.com/; *Hanks, P. (2004).Corpus pattern analysis. In Euralex Proceedings (Vol. 1, pp. 87-98)