Category: corpus linguistics

V online summer school: Writing science in English

  • 08/09/2020 – 11/09/2020
  • Online

You can join this course here. Inscripciones: URL.

2019 edition, unforgettable memories!!!!!!!!!

Writing for the masses. A practical introduction to writing scientific -academic English in blogs – September 8

Dissemination and impact of our research have become as important as research itself in many ways. Doing science in the 21st century cannot be understood as a practice that is situated exclusively in highly specialised journals. Writing for the ‘public’ out there is absolutely essential these days to make sure our research is both visible and, most importantly, fundable. However, blog writing is rarely discussed as a soft skill. In this workshop we will use ad-hoc blog data to discuss the differences between research article writing and blog writing. Particularly, we will look at stance-making and positioning in blogs. During this session, students will write their own posts.

Pascual Pérez-Paredes is a Professor in Applied Linguistics and Linguistics, U. Murcia, Lecturer in Research in Second Language Education at the University of Cambridge and Salvador de Madariaga Research Fellow, NAU, US. His main research interests are learner language variation, the use of corpora in language education and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. He has published extensively in journals such as CALL, Discourse & Society, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Pragmatics, Language, Learning & Technology, System, ReCALL and the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. He was the Overall Coordinator of the MEd Research Methods Strand at the University of Cambridge. He is an Official Translator, Intérprete Jurado, appointed by the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de España. He is the Assistant Editor of Cambridge University Press ReCALL (Q1 31 out of 187 in Linguistics).

Niall Curry is a Lecturer in Academic Writing at the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University. His research is interdisciplinary and centres on language pedagogy and the application of corpus linguistic approaches to different areas of applied linguistics. Among these areas is a focus on corpus-based studies of academic writing and metadiscourse in English, French, and Spanish, corpus-based contrastive linguistics, corpus-based studies of English language and language change, and corpus linguistics for TESOL and language teaching materials development. For further details on his background, areas of interest, projects, and current research, see his website.

Conference and paper abstracts – September 8

This session will be devoted to present what abstracts in general are, how abstracts are organised from the point of view of genre analysis, paying special attention to the organization in moves and steps. Next, we will focus on how the language can help as a tool to identify their different parts. We will analyse different types of abstracts, such as structured and non-structured abstracts. Our last step will bring us to study in detail how conference abstracts are organised and written. We will also study examples of conference abstracts and will propose ways to improve them to be successful.

Pilar Aguado-Jiménez joined the English Department at the University of Murcia in 1990. She taught business English (1990/99) and general English (1990/–). She took her PhD in 1997. She has been a language advisor for the CAGE Panel, Cambridge University Press (2003/05). Her main current areas of research are TEFL, and ESP. She has been involved in several international projects as TELLOP (Erasmus+ 2020), VGCLIL and VGCLIL for Migrants.

The research article: the literature review – September 9

In the first part of the session, the structure of the research paper will be analysed in detail considering the perspective of genre analysis, as the analysis of language accounts for, not only the way a text is constructed, but also for the way it is likely to be interpreted, used and exploited in specific contexts to achieve specific goals. Within this genre perspective particular attention will be paid to the steps or “moves” that perform a particular communicative function associated with the writer’s purpose. This “move” perspective will be applied to all sections of the research paper. In the second part, an analysis of the different  “moves” or steps will be carried out in the Literature Review. A theoretical and practical approach Will be combined in the two sessions. 

Purificación Sánchez is a Lecturer at the Department of English Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Murcia. Her main areas of research are corpus-assisted discourse analysis and English for Specific Purposes. She has published in RESLA, Ibérica, System, English Text Construction,  Higher Education in Europe and Discourse & Society.

How to write good academic /scientific English using corpora – September 9

This workshop centres on the construction and analysis of academic writing corpora using AntCorGen, TagAnt, and AntConc. Initially, we will focus on academic writing with the intention to highlight practices and foci within the field. Next, we will consider academic writing corpora, highlighting corpus construction considerations and tagging processes necessary for effective corpus-based analyses of academic writing. Using a bespoke academic corpus, we will analyse both untagged and tagged corpus data to learn more about writing and disciplinary conventions. The workshop will close with a brief analysis of what is called metadiscourse in academic writing with participants having the opportunity to present key insights they have gleaned from their own analyses.

Niall Curry is a Lecturer in Academic Writing at the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University. His research is interdisciplinary and centres on language pedagogy and the application of corpus linguistic approaches to different areas of applied linguistics. Among these areas is a focus on corpus-based studies of academic writing and metadiscourse in English, French, and Spanish, corpus-based contrastive linguistics, corpus-based studies of English language and language change, and corpus linguistics for TESOL and language teaching materials development. For further details on his background, areas of interest, projects, and current research, see his website.

The research article: results and discussion – September 10

This session is designed for multilingual students who grew up speaking a language other than English. It will help you develop your ability to express the results and discussion of your research effectively. You will become aware of your most troublesome aspects and learn strategies for improving vocabulary use, discourse options, paragraph format and organization. In academic English, your research results and discussion will be assessed by readers by your control of certain conventions, which may change depending on your audience and purpose. In this sense, this course will give you some tips to improve the way to express results and comment data. This course is divided into 4 units which deal with the written characteristics of the results and discussion of academic English. At the end of every unit you will have to do a compulsory test as part of the evaluation of this course.

María Luisa Carrió-Pastor is a Professor of English language at Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. Currently she is the head of the Department of Applied Linguistics and the coordinator of the Doctorate degree “Languages, Literature, Culture and, their applications”. Her research areas are contrastive linguistics, pragmatics and the study of academic and professional discourse both for second language acquisition and discourse analysis

Writing for the reader – September 10

This workshops puts the reader at the centre of writing. We’ll look at signposting, use of headings,  consistency, formatting, style, referencing.  We’ll identify what you can do before you start, while you’re in the different draft stages of your writing and how to polish your final piece with detailed editing and proof-reading.

Geraldine Mark has over 30 years’ experience as editor and author researcher, and lecturer, drawn from applied linguistics, language teaching and learning, language analysis and materials development. Principal interests in corpus linguistics and its pedagogical applications.

Writing grant proposals – September 11

Grant proposals have a great impact on the scientific and academic community, since getting funding is paramount for our scientific progress and social development. Thus, knowing the essentials of a grant proposal may help applicants to succeed in their goal. The current course will give a general picture of what we understand by grant proposals and the types of grant proposals we might find. I will also provide participants with some resources to work autonomously on their future grant proposals. Some course materials include Pandadoc template grant proposals, research Grants on Education Spencer Foundation

Recommended book:
Carlson M. and O’Neal-Elrath, T. (2002) Winning grants Step by Step. John Wiley and Sons, New York: USA.

Begoña Bellés Fortuño, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Universitat Jaume I, Spain, where she lectures English Studies degree students as well as in the degree of Medicine: She also supervises MA projects in the Secondary Education, Vocational Training and Language Teaching Master degree. She is currently the Director of the Interuniversity Institute of Modern Applied Languages (IULMA) at Universitat Jaume I. She is the Editor-In-Chief of Language Value journal and one of the executive directors of IBERICA journal. She has reviewed articles for JEAP, System or Language and Communication among other journals.

Writing for an international audience: the anglo tradition – September 11

It is a fact that the best science is ‘heavily biased’ toward journals published in English from English-speaking countries (Lillis and Curry 2010), which requires that all authors master the craft of writing in such contexts. The Saxonic intellectual style (Galtum, 1985) is characterized by an intensive use of data typically in ‘what is often a team effort’. This style is interested in hypothesis generation, actively engages in ‘dialogue with their peers and seeks to smooth out divergences of opinion’. Other styles use radically different angles to approach writing and reading science. In what is described here as the anglo tradition, reader orientation and essay form is actually of utmost importance to academic culture (Hermanns, 1985). In this session we will examine the fundamental tenets of this tradition: criticality, development of argument, rhetorical transfer and clarity.

Pascual Pérez-Paredes is a Professor in Applied Linguistics and Linguistics, U. Murcia, Lecturer in Research in Second Language Education at the University of Cambridge and Salvador de Madariaga Research Fellow, NAU, US. His main research interests are learner language variation, the use of corpora in language education and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. He has published extensively in journals such as CALL, Discourse & Society, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Pragmatics, Language, Learning & Technology, System, ReCALL and the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. He was the Overall Coordinator of the MEd Research Methods Strand at the University of Cambridge. He is an Official Translator, Intérprete Jurado, appointed by the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de España. He is the Assistant Editor of Cambridge University Press ReCALL (Q1 31 out of 187 in Linguistics).

Corpora and metadata

Lou Burnard:

[…] it is no exaggeration to say that without metadata, corpus linguistics would be virtually impossible. Why? Because corpus linguistics is an empirical science, in which the investigator seeks to identify patterns of linguistic behaviour by inspection and analysis of naturally occurring samples of language. A typical corpus analysis will therefore gather together many examples of linguistic usage, each taken out of the context in which it originally occurred, like a laboratory specimen. Metadata can restore that context by supplying information about it, thus enabling us to relate the specimen to its original habitat. Furthermore, since language corpora are constructed from pre-existing pieces of language, questions of accuracy and authenticity are all but inevitable when using them: without metadata, the investigator has no way of answering such questions. Without metadata, the investigator has nothing but disconnected words of unknowable provenance or authenticity[1].

[1] URL: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/wip/metadata.html

References: Burnard, Lou; Aston, Guy (1998). The BNC handbook: exploring the British National Corpus. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Transcription

Here you can find some useful resources to carry out your transcription project.

MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Brian MacWhinney (2019) Tools for Analyzing Talk. Part 1: The CHAT Transcription Format. URL:
https://childes.talkbank.org/

Leech (2004): types of annotation

phonetic annotation e.g. adding information about how a word in a spoken corpus was pronounced.


prosodic annotation — again in a spoken corpus — adding information about prosodic features such as stress, intonation and pauses.

syntactic annotation —e.g. adding information about how a given sentence is parsed, in terms of syntactic analysis into such units such phrases and clauses

semantic annotation e.g. adding information about the semantic category of words — the noun cricket as a term for a sport and as a term for an insect belong to different semantic categories, although there is no difference in spelling or pronunciation.


pragmatic annotation e.g. adding information about the kinds of speech act (or dialogue act) that occur in a spoken dialogue — thus the utterance okay on different occasions may be an acknowledgement, a request for feedback, an acceptance, or a pragmatic marker initiating a new phase of discussion.
discourse annotation e.g. adding information about anaphoric links in a text, for example connecting the pronoun them and its antecedent the horses in: I’ll saddle the horses and bring them round. [an example from the Brown corpus]


stylistic annotation e.g. adding information about speech and thought presentation (direct speech, indirect speech, free indirect thought, etc.)
lexical annotation adding the identity of the lemma of each word form in a text — i.e. the base form of the word, such as would occur as its headword in a dictionary (e.g. lying has the lemma LIE).

Online services:

https://transcribe.wreally.com/

https://otranscribe.com/

BRAT: http://brat.nlplab.org/introduction.html

Backbone Transcriptor. URL

Gate: https://gate.ac.uk/teaching.html

Folia: https://proycon.github.io/folia/

Metadata for corpus work: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/wip/metadata.html

Annotation on Sketch Engine: https://www.sketchengine.eu/guide/annotating-corpus-text/

TEI by example website: https://teibyexample.org/modules/TBED02v00.htm

Five tenets that shape usage-inspired L2 instruction (Tyler & Ortega, 2018)

The folowing is from Tyler, A., Ortega, L. (2018) Usage-inspired L2 instructionAn emergent, researched pedagogy. In Tyler, A., Ortega, L., Uno, M., & Park, H. I. (eds). Usage-inspired L2 Instruction : Researched Pedagogy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

There is little question that learning language is one of the most complex accomplishments humans achieve. This is true for the first language learner and perhaps even more so for the second language learner.

There is no one, definitive usage-based model of language and language learning; rather a usage-based perspective encompasses a family of linguistic and language developmental approaches – including cognitive linguistics, emergentism, con-structionism, and complex dynamic systems theory. They are united by their em-phasis on the notion that actual language use is a primary shaper of linguistic form and the foundation for language learning.

Tenet 1: language learning is meaning based

A first usage-based tenet is that language and language learning are meaning based. The centrality of meaning in grammar is acknowledged in most contempo-rary thinking about communicative language teaching (Larsen-Freeman, 2012). However, in usage-based theories it is taken to a new radical level of theoretical commitment. First, contrary to the traditional axiom that the linguistic sign is arbitrary, in usage-based theories a large proportion of the connections between a form and its meaning are understood to be motivated. An example is the traditional position that lexical forms with more than one meaning are understood as unrelated homophones, whose many meanings simply have to be memorized. […] For second language learners, understanding that nearly all words have multiple meanings and that the meanings are systematically related into polysemy networks can provide powerful tools for learning vocabulary (e.g., Tyler, 2012). […] Second, not just words, but all units of grammar are said to be meaningful beyond the sum of the meanings of their parts (Langacker, 1991). For instance, syntactic patterns such as English ‘Noun-Verb-Noun-Noun’ (Homer gave Bart a puppy) are seen not to receive their meaning from the verb, but to convey the abstract constructional meaning ‘Someone Causes Someone to Receive Something,’ with several extended senses organized around this central meaning in a polysemy network (Goldberg, 1995). […] At the broadest level, the centrality of meaning tenet posits that linguistic structure cannot be fully understood if isolated from the study of how language is employed to create meaning.

Tenet 2: meaning is embodied

A second usage-based tenet posits that meaning is grounded in the physical world and is embodied (Barsalou, 2016) and therefore language and language learn-ing are too. Namely, basic human interactions with the physical world provide a foundation for human conceptual and cognitive representations, which are in turn reflected in language. To illustrate, across languages, vision verbs (look at, see) are more frequent than other sensing verbs (of hearing, touching, tasting, or smelling) because sight is the dominant human sense and human cognition orients univer-sally to visual phenomena, for example engaging brain activity for up to 50% of the cortex (San Roque et al., 2015). Another oft-cited illustration is that humans’ physical experience of upright stance and gravity shapes metaphors pervasive in everyday language involving the two orientations ‘up’ and ‘down’ as positive and negative, respectively (e.g., keep up the good work!, I feel down) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). In the usage-based family of theories, cognitive linguistics (CL) has made the deepest commitment to experientially grounded and embodied meaning (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Langacker, 1991)

Tenet 3: language learning is contextualized interaction

The third usage-based tenet is that language and language learning are critically situated in contextualized social interactions. Actual language use is culturally, socially, and contextually embedded, because all usage events are tied to particular speech communities. Natural language always occurs in context, and the user’s choices in crafting an utterance are influenced by an array of contextual factors. Context itself is complex and multidimensional and gives rise to subtle, interacting linguistic reflexes. For instance, all usage-based models have recognized the audience or the participants in an interaction as a major aspect of context, be it in relation to genre (Martin & Rose, 2008), listener expectations (Gumperz, 1982; Tyler, 1994a, 1994b, 2012), or ground, a technical term in CL that posits participants make mental contact by coorienting to a shared construal in which one concept, the ground, is anchor for another concept, the figure (Langacker 1991; Taylor, 2002). Each syntactic pattern or construction is analyzed as serving to present a particular perspective or speaker stance. While the notion of the importance of context in language production and interpretation is, of course, not unique to usage-based approaches, the search for linguistic reflexes of context and the view of syntax as constructional templates replete with pragmatic information are unique technical operationalizations of the tenet, beyond just asserting that context is important. Speakers craft their message by choosing from an array of subtle resources gleaned from the surrounding discourse community. Subtle changes in the relationship between the speaker and the audience result in changes in the speaker’s language choices and, conversely, subtle changes in language choices can change the rela-tionship between the speaker and the audience. For multilingual as for monolin-gual users, creating (and learning) language is a social, purpose-driven endeavor (Douglas Fir Group, 2016)

Tenet 4: language learning emerged from domain-general mechanisms

Language and language learning emerge from the same general cognitive mechanisms involved in all aspects of learning, driven by various aspects of input, particularly frequency. In the usage-based family of theories, constructionism, CL, and emergentism have made the deepest commit-ment to these general cognitive mechanisms (e.g., pattern finding, abstraction, induction, schematization) and to frequency-driven statistical learning from the input (Saffran, 2003). As Nick Ellis and his colleagues have shown (Ellis, Römer, & O’Donnell, 2016), statistical learning constrains all language learning (including the learning of second languages), because humans are delicately sensitive to the frequencies and contexts in which they have encountered linguistic units. Much of language learning is thought to take place implicitly, and implicit and incidental learning are considered to represent a substantial portion of language learning in children as much as in adults. For this reason, usage-based approaches can often be assumed to accord little theoretical status to explicit learning.

Tenet 5: language learning is open to variability

The fifth and final usage-based tenet we submit for consideration is that language and language learning are open to variability and change all throughout the life span. Nonlinearity and variability have always been acknowledged in interlanguage theory. A usage-based perspective goes further by questioning the assumption, as do Dąbrowska (2012) for L1 and Larsen-Freeman (2006) for L2, that certain aspects of the language are categorically acquired without variation by L1 users, on the one hand, and variably and perhaps impossibly learned by L2 users, on the other. Moreover, also under scrutiny is the notion of developmental sequences that are valid for all learners and learning trajectories (Lowie & Verspoor, 2015). Fine-tuned, corpus based exploration of constructions within a language help reveal subtle, regular variation in grammatical patterns, such as articulation or omission of that complementizers under particular, systematic conditions (e.g., Wulff, Lester, & Martinez-Garcia, 2014) and many other phenomena (Ellis, Römer, & O’Donnell, 2016). Studies show that as they advance in proficiency L2 learners change their production from patterns that more closely match those of the L1 to those they hear with sufficient frequency in the meaningful surrounding linguistic ambiance. Even at highly advanced levels, learners continue to be sensitive to the frequencies with which they hear patterns in the target language and implicitly adjust their production accordingly. Further, as no linguistic unit is ever produced exactly the same in exactly the same context, the input itself is constantly variable. Thus, language learning is ever open to change and variation. Since lan-guage is thought to be inseparable from the users and the usage events that bring it about, as long as there is use, there can be learning (Larsen-Freeman, 2006). This is true all along the life span, and for all the languages and language varieties of multilingual and monolingual users.

Tyler, A., Ortega, L. (2018) Usage-inspired L2 instructionAn emergent, researched pedagogy. In Tyler, A., Ortega, L., Uno, M., & Park, H. I. (eds). Usage-inspired L2 Instruction : Researched Pedagogy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Starting corpus-based CDA: 4 references

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., & McEnery, T. (2013). Sketching Muslims: a corpus driven analysis of representations around the word ‘Muslim’ in the British press 1998–2009. Applied Linguistics, 34(3), 255-278. (Text)

Baker, P. and Levon, E. (2015) ‘Picking the right cherries?: a comparison of corpus-based and qualitative analyses of news articles about masculnity.’ Discourse and Communication 9(2): 221-336.

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyżanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse & society, 19(3), 273-306. (Text)

Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (Eds.). (2015). Methods of critical discourse studies. London: Sage.