Pre-conference Workshops

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling
(University of Oslo)
s.o.ebeling@ilos.uio.no

Hilde Hasselgård
(University of Oslo)
hilde.hasselgard@ilos.uio.no

Before the conference a special workshop will be organized on cross-linguistic perspectives on verb constructions. Much corpus-based contrastive work has already been done on various aspects of the verb phrase, including tense/aspect/modality constructions, multi-word verbs, verb complementation and phraseological patterns of verbs. By focusing on the (extended) verb phrase, we hope that the workshop will illuminate this area by means of comparisons with different languages and with different corpora.

All abstracts [PDF format]

Kerstin Kunz
(University of Heidelberg)
kerstin.kunz@iued.uni-heidelberg.de

Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski
(Saarland University)
e.lapshinova@mx.uni-saarland.de 

In recent years, more innovative methods of corpus-based analysis are used to investigate relations on the level of text or discourse. The workshop is organised with a focus on these new approaches and will include methods of corpus exploitation, e.g. (semi-)automatic identification of discourse relations, as well as new methods of statistical evaluation (e.g. multivariate statistical analysis).

The papers presented will report on finalised studies or on work in progress. They will cover a variety of discourse phenomena such as cohesion and coherence, information structure and information packaging. The variation investigated will concern intra-lingual variation between registers and between written and spoken language, contrasts between several languages and differences between translations and originals.

The workshop will end with a final discussion. It will mainly revolve around the question of how different aspects of discourse can be analysed in combination, both from the perspective of data exploration and data interpretation:

1. Which categories have to be defined? How many levels of analysis are needed? Which relations between which elements are concerned?
2. What are the dependent and what are the independent variables?
3. Which tools are best for semi-automatic extraction? Which tools can be combined?

Elena Seoane
(University of Vigo)
elena.seoane@uvigo.es

Cristina Suárez-Gómez
(University of the Balearic Islands)
cristina.suarez@uib.es

Valentin Werner
(University of Bamberg)
valentin.werner@uni-bamberg.de

While the area of the present perfect has always been a hotly contested ground, recent corpus-analyses have shown that grammatical variation in this realm in English is far more pervasive than has been assumed. This is particularly true when non-native and learner Englishes are taken into account (cf. Davydova 2011; Elsness 2009a, 2009b; Hundt and Smith 2009; Miller 2000, 2004; Seoane and Suárez-Gómez 2013; Suárez-Gómez and Seoane 2013; van Rooy 2009; Werner 2013; Yao and Collins 2012). These studies have addressed the issue from diverse theoretical perspectives and methodologies and using different approaches, both function-to-form and form-to-function, in an attempt to account for the envelope of variation under scrutiny.

This workshop is open to synchronic, diachronic and contrastive corpus-based research on the expression of the present perfect and the perfective in both native and non-native varieties of English. We especially welcome contributions which go beyond the traditional ascription of the perfect to the construction have + past participle for the expression of perfect meaning (Quirk et al. 1985: 192-195; Biber et al. 1999: 467; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 143) and observe variation determined by sociolinguistic variables such as mode, dialect, style, register, genre as well as by the individual interpretation of what the ‘perfect time span’ means (Rothstein 2008), especially in cases in which there is no explicit time frame specification from a temporal adverbial.

We also want to motivate participants to foster discussion about how these new findings from data analyses help to shed light on theoretical issues such as the grammaticalization of some adverbs as perfect markers (e.g. just, yet, (n)ever, cf. Miller 2004), the implications behind the apparent reversal of the long-term shift towards analyticity of other Germanic languages observed in the retreat of the present perfect in English (cf. Ten Cate 2005: 5; Elsness 2009b: 242; Van Rooy 2009: 311-312; cf. Hundt and Smith 2009), the role of register in historical variation and change (cf. Elsness 2009b; Biber and Gray 2013), the potential role of language contact as a driving force in the innovations attested in the use of the present perfect and its different variants (Mair 2013) and the repercussions of corpus linguistics research on the teaching of English as a second language.

Full workshop description including abstracts (PDF format)

 LUNCH

WORKSHOP OPENING

 COFFEE BREAK

END OF WORKSHOP

Vaclav Brezina

(Lancaster University)

v.brezina@lancaster.ac.uk

This workshop will discuss different statistical procedures available for analysis of sociolinguistic data in large language corpora. I will demonstrate that the traditional approach of using aggregated data with the log-likelihood statistic is in principle unreliable. Instead, the workshop will offer suggestions for alternative methodologies and statistical procedures, which take into account within group differences and therefore produce more meaningful results.
As part of the workshop, a new research tool BNC64 Search & Compare will be introduced. BNC 64 Search & Compare can carry out detailed analyses based on a socially-balanced spoken corpus BNC64 (1.5 million words). BNC 64 represents the speech of 64 speakers – 32 men and 32 women – extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC). BNC64 Search and Compare is a web-based environment that creates simple visualisations, calculates statistics and produces concordances. The website was created to allow for easy visualisations of complex corpus data and easy testing of a number of different sociolinguistic hypotheses.
The workshop will be structured around a series of practical exercises guiding the participants through different types of analysis of corpus data and statistical procedures.
The following areas will be covered:

1. Sociolinguistic data in language corpora
2. Descriptive and inferential statistics
3. Individual and social variation
4. The null-hypothesis testing paradigm and the “new” statistics
5. Statistics covered: Log-likelihood, Mann-Whitney U test, Spearman’s rank correlation, Confidence Intervals, Robust mean difference, Robust Cohen’s d

The workshop does not require any prior knowledge of statistics. It will be of interest to anyone who wants to explore sociolinguistic data using language corpora.

More detailed information about the workshop can be found at this website.

Time: 13.00 - 15.00

University of Nottingham:

Michaela Mahlberg michaela.mahlberg@nottingham.ac.uk

Peter Stockwell peter.stockwell@nottingham.ac.uk

Rein Sikveland Rein.Sikveland@nottingham.ac.uk

This workshop aims to contribute to the growing area of research that employs corpus linguistic methods in the study of literary texts. The papers in the workshop address research questions in 'corpus stylistics' from a variety of angles: with a focus on literary effects, differences between genres, literary translation, cognitive approaches and the reading experience.

The workshop will also present corpus software that is specifically designed to support the analysis of literary texts.  

University of Nottingham:

Kevin Harvey
Kevin.Harvey@nottingham.ac.uk

Gavin Brookes
Gavin.Brookes@nottingham.ac.uk

Electronic corpora are being harnessed by scholars of health communication now more than they ever have been. Corpus-assisted research into health communication has developed significantly over the last 15 years and continues to develop apace. This workshop will add to this burgeoning field of corpus-based health communication research through a series of talks which demonstrate how the analysis of corpora containing health-related communication from a wide variety of contexts (such as spoken interviews, email and electronic support group fora) can provide exciting and unique insights into the way people communicate about their subjective health experiences. A key theme addressed in this workshop is the power of the corpus to challenge researcher intuition and provide novel insights into people’s subjective experiences of health-related issues; findings which can, and have in the past, help to inform clinical decision-making and treatment-planning in real-world therapeutic contexts.