The Corpus Linguistics Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics will hold a one-day seminar on Friday 28th April 2006 at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK (for travel directions see http://www3.open.ac.uk/contact/locations.aspx ). It will take place in Central Meeting Room 15, Christodolou Building, from 10am - 5pm.
The title for the seminar is 'Text analysis using corpora - methodological issues'. More and more applied linguists (broadly defined) are drawing on corpus resources to increase the power and rigour of their text analyses. This is becoming prevalent in areas such as Argument Studies, Academic Literacies, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Educational Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Literary Stylistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies (to name but a few). But for each benefit a corpus-informed text analysis offers, a host of prickly but fascinating methodological issues may be thrown up, which in turn create problems for what can be claimed in analysis and interpretation. Alongside these newer issues and problems are some now well-known reflections on the limits of what can be claimed from corpus analysis (e.g. by Guy Cook and Henry Widdowson).
The BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG seminar is devoted to providing a stimulating and supportive environment for pooling individual tussles with such problems so as to lead to better informed reflection on combining text-based and corpus-informed methods of analysis. In turn, we hope in this sort of environment that ways can be suggested for increasing the rigour as well as the clarity of what scholars can claim for such a combinatory approach. Given the nature of the forum, it will be of benefit to not only established academics but also postgraduate students who may be dealing with such issues.
The invited speakers are:
Guy Cook (Open University)
Susan Hunston (Birmingham University)
The programme for the day is as follows:
10.00 Introduction (Kieran O'Halloran)
10.15 - 11.15 Susan Hunston (Guest Speaker) Text and Intertextuality: Debating the Issues
11.15 - 12.15 Guy Cook (Guest Speaker) “It just says ‘could' . Yes I just spotted that.” Corpus facts in discourse analysis.
12.15 - 12.45 Bettina Starcke, University of Trier Corpus Linguistic Evidence and Criteria for its Evaluation
Lunch
Problems with Data Identification
1.45 - 2.15 Lynne Cameron and Alice Deignan,
University of Leeds Emergentism, metaphor and text analysis
2.15 - 2.45 David Oakey, University of Birmingham
Phraseology beyond the bundle: finding a way in
2.45 - 3.15 Duncan Hunter and Richard Smith, University of Warwick Identifying keywords and charting their development: Methodological issues in corpus-based historical research
Coffee / Tea
Issues around Spoken Data
3.45 - 4.15 Svenja Adolphs and Dawn Knight, Nottingham University
Analysing spoken corpora: methodological issues and technological challenges
4.15 - 4.45 Nuria Hernandez, Freiburg University Dialect corpora and orthographic dialect transcriptions – some methodological considerations
4.45 - 5.00 Summary and final discussion
Abstracts
To view the abstracts for the talks, follow this link:
Contact
For further information about the event, contact:
Lia Blaj ( L.L.Blaj@open.ac.uk )
Institute of Educational Technology,
Room 199, Geoffrey Crowther Building,
The Open University,
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
UK
The local organisers are: Dr Kieran O'Halloran, Dr Caroline Coffin (Centre for Language and Communications, The Open University) and Lia Blaj (Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University).