Category: corpus linguistics

#CFP AACL 2020 NAU

The 15thInternational American Association for Corpus Linguistics Conference (AACL2020) will take place September 18-19 2020 at Northern Arizona University

Main conference general program
Call for papers. We invite contributions on a broad and inclusive basis. There are three categories of proposals (full papers, posters and panels). All proposals will be peer-reviewed by the conference program committee. The conference will feature three thematic streams in the general program. The thematic streams are as follows:

  1. Linguistic analyses of corpora as they relate to language use (e.g., register/genre variation, lexical and grammatical variation, language varieties, historical change, lexicography)
  2. Application (the use of corpora in language teaching and learning, as well as other applied fields such as testing and legal research)
  3. Tools and methods (corpus creation, corpus annotation, tagging and parsing, corpus analysis software)

Submission categories

There will be three categories of presentations at the conference:
Full papers
Consisting of a 20-minute talk followed by 5 minutes for questions and discussion. Submissions should present completed research where substantial results have been achieved. (Work in progress should be submitted as a poster abstract.) Abstracts should be 300 words (maximum), excluding the word count for references.
Posters
Posters can present either results of completed research or work in progress.. We especially welcome poster abstracts that (a) report on innovative research that is in its early phases, or (b) report on new software or corpus data resources. Abstracts should be 200 words (maximum), excluding the word count for references.
Panels
Panels during the main conference offer an opportunity to group related papers together to allow for extended discussions. Proposals for panels should include the abstracts for the individual presentations (300 words max), together with an introductory abstract (200 words max) introducing the overall goals of the panel. Panels will be allocated time slots up to a maximum of 2 hours.

Pre-conference Workshops
Half-day pre-conference workshops will take place on Thursday Sept 17. Abstracts for submission (max. 300 words) should include a complete description of the half-day workshop (max time 3 hours).

Submission guidelines:
Submit abstracts to aacl@nau.edu by January 30, 2020.
Cover page: Author(s) name(s); Affiliation; Contact information; Title; Submission Category and thematic stream

Abstract page: Submission category; Title; Abstract
Format: MS Word or PDF (the latter is necessary if the abstract contains specialized fonts).

Scott & Tribble (2006) on discovering pottential patterns

The second aspect is summarised in that phrase “potential patterns”. How so? The process operates in two stages. First, all the effort of a concordancer or a word-listing application goes into reducing a vast and complex object to a much simpler shape. That is, a set of 100 million words on a confusing wealth of topics in a variety of styles and produced by innumerable people for a lot of different reasons gets reduced to a mere list in alphabetical order. A rich chaos of language is reduced, it is “boiled down” to a simpler set. In the vapours that have steamed off are all the facts about who wrote the texts and what they meant.We have therefore lost a great deal in that process, and if it damaged the original texts we would never dare do it.

The advantage comes in the second stage where one examines the boiled down extract, the list of words, the concordance. It is here that something not far different from the sometimes-scorned “intuition” comes in. This is imagination. Insight. Human beings are unable to see shapes, lists, displays, or sets without insight, without seeing in them “patterns”. It seems to be a characteristic of the homo sapiens mind that it is often unable to see things “as they are” but imposes on them a tendency, a trend, a pattern. From the earliest times, the very stars in the sky have been perceived as belonging in “constellations”. This capability can come at a cost, of course: it may be easy to spot a pattern in a cloud or in a constellation and thereby build up a mistaken theory; but the point is that it is this ordinary imaginative capacity, that of seeing a pattern, which is there in all of us and which makes it possible for corpus-based methods to make a relatively large impact on language theory. For with these twin resources, namely the tools to manipulate a lot of data in many different ways and without wasting much time, combined with the power of imagination and pattern-recognition, it becomes possible to chase up patterns that seem to be there and come up with insights affecting linguistic theory itself. The tools we use generate patterns (lists, plots, colour arrangements) and it is when we see these that in some cases the pattern “jumps out” at us. In other cases we may need training to see the patterns but the endeavour is itself largely a search for pattern.

Scott, M. & Tribble, C. 2006. Textual Patterns: keyword and corpus analysis in language education. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (pp. 5-6).

Acquiring text varities

One of the most important goals of formal schooling is teaching text varieties that might not be acquired outside of school […] Early in school, children learn to read books of many different types, including fictional stories, historical accounts of past events, and descriptions of natural phenomena. These varieties rely on different linguistic structures and patterns, and students must learn how to recognize and interpret those differences. At the same time, students must learn how to produce some of these different varieties, for example writing a narrative essay on what they did during summer vacation versus a persuasive essay on whether the school cafeteria should sell candy. The amount of explicit instruction in different text varieties varies across teachers, schools, and countries, but even at a young age, students must somehow learn to control and interpret the language of different varieties, or they will not succeed at school.

Biber & Conrad (2009:3)

Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).

Check other quotations here.

Improving Writing Through Corpora

Online Data-Driven Learning SPOC “Improving Writing Through Corpora” is now live at the following address:
https://edge.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UQx+SLATx+2019/about

Improvements in Version 2 include:

A) All course images and functionality have been updated for the ‘new’ Sketch Engine interface.


B) New functions specific to the ‘new’ Sketch Engine interface are now included in the course (e.g. Good Dictionary EXamples (GDEX))


C) Course is now completely self-contained – no need for external assessments.  Certificates of completion generated automatically upon completion of online activities.  


D) Improved reflective component and opportunities for peer discussion.


The course is primarily pitched at L2 graduate writing students, but anyone is eligible, whether a student, lecturer, or anyone with an interest in language and technology. 

To enrol, follow the instructions at the link provided.  Please contact the course creator Dr. Peter Crosthwaite at p.cros@uq.edu.au with any questions or technical problems.