Professor Michaela Mahlberg from the School of English will deliver her Inaugural Lecture "Applying Corpus Linguistics". The Lecture will be hosted by Professor Stephen Mumford, Dean of the Faculty of Arts. After the Inaugural Lecture there will be a reception in the Senate Chamber. Please register your attendance using the link above.
Corpus linguistics investigates language on the basis of electronically stored samples of naturally occurring language. The focus on natural data emphasises the social dimension of language. In contrast to made-up examples, the texts in a corpus are used by people in real communicative situations. So corpus linguistics can contribute to the investigation of what people do with language and how they view the world. Corpus data is stored electronically in a format that allows further processing with computer tools. The data can be searched and displayed in a number of ways, and the computer makes it possible to look at language from different points of view. The lecture will discuss how the application of corpus linguistic methods and concepts affects our linguistic world view. In particular, it will explore the fuzzy boundaries between literary and non-literary texts looking at examples from Dickens’s novels
The University of Nottingham NottinghamNG7 2RD
telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5900 fax: +44 (0) 115 951 5924 email: cral@nottingham.ac.uk