This
year I participated in the Corpus Linguistics Summer School on Discourse, Language and Society at Lancaster University which took
place from 25-28 of June. The school was inspiring on many levels. It
was a great opportunity to learn about Corpus Linguistics from top
scholars in the field. I also gained insights into many domains such
as health communication and historical linguistics. Here I am, in the
bright summer days of Great Britain, reflecting on my participation
in the school.
Corpus Linguistics methods and tools
In
the school, we explored the meaning of Corpus Linguistics (CL), its
methods and strengths.
So is CL a method or an approach or both?! In his lecture, Andrew
Hardie described corpus linguistics as a “toolkit for research
which gives us the power to search, process and analyse a vast and
complex array of language data”. Through CL tools, we can explore
the frequency of a particular word and its collocations. So why are
collocations worth exploring? As Paul Baker explained in his lecture,
when we see words together (e.g. “illegal immigrant”), we would
be primed to associate one word (immigrant) with the other (illegal).
The
school included lab sessions in which we we used three
websites/software
for corpus analysis: CQP (Corpus Query Processor) Web, #LancsBox and
W-Matrix. CQP
web is
a good starting point to explore corpus linguistics. In Paul
Baker’s lecture, for example, we searched for the word “refugees”
in the British National Corpus. One interesting collocate of refugees
was the word “flood” i.e. “flood of refugees” in which
refugees are represented in a negative way as a burden or a danger.
In other lectures, we used LancsBox to create graphs of collocates
and collocational networks. As for W-Matrix, it allowed us to gain
insights into keyness (words which are more frequent in one corpus in
reference to another corpus) and to identify the main semantic fields
(topics) in a corpus.
I
have always thought of statistics as dull or boring but Vaclav
Brezina gave us very interesting lectures on statistics in which we
steadily learnt about key concepts such as mean, median, the null
hypothesis and the different ways to look at statistical
significance. His engaging approach to statistics motivates me to
read his forthcoming book Statistics
in Corpus Linguistics: A Practical Guide.
Multi-disciplinarity
As
much as learning about CL methods and
tools, the school allowed me to explore new domains such as forensic
linguistics! Claire
Hardaker gave us a very interesting lecture about forensic
linguistics, its scope, types and the application of CL to forensic
linguistics. I find it inspiring that she keeps a blog on forensic
linguistics and organizes
a writing retreat for students and scholars involved in work in
forensic linguistics.
Elena
Semino gave us a great plenary lecture on corpus linguistics and
health communication. She presented
the methodology and findings of two recent studies she undertook with
a multidisciplinary team on communication about chronic (neuropathic)
pain. As she pointed out, chronic pain can be a difficult task to
talk about, which can have negative implications for patients and
health care providers. The two studies drew on innovative methods. In
one study, for example, patients were given cards (from which they
choose one/s) to relate to as they described their feelings of pain.
While Elena Semino is already a superstar in stylistics and metaphor
theory, she has turned her attention to health communication. I look
forward to reading her forthcoming book Metaphor,
Cancer and the End of Life: A corpus-Based Study.
Other
domains that I explored in the school are lexicography and historical
linguistics. In Jonathan Culpeper’s lectures, I learnt about the
Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project; he explained the
myths that surrounded Shakespeare’s language and how the
development of CL resources and software made it possible to analyse
Shakespeare’s language, also in relation to the general language of
the period. For more about Culpeper’s journey with corpus
linguistics and the Shakespeare’s Language Project, you may like to
listen
to this comprehensive interview with him
available on YouTube!
Tony
McEnery gave us another fascinating lecture about the representation
of the marginalised groups in 17th
century England. One particular example intrigued me as it relates to
coffee making! He showed us how there is a vast literature/discourse
around the “Mohammedan berry”, which refers to coffee beans that
were introduced from Istanbul to England in the 17th
century. In this discourse, Ottomans were represented as dangerous
or wanting to undermine the social fabric of the society at the time.
In my notes of McEnery’s lecture, I found myself drawing stars on
his remark on the 'longevity' of discourses. Discourses (for example,
on Muslims and blacks) can be produced in a particular era and can
lie in the background for many years or eras before they are called
upon again at a certain moment in time.
Overall,
the school was truly a festival of ideas as one participant in the
school described it. It was also a call for a critical approach to
language analysis or as Tony McEnery put it in the closing plenary of
the school, be critical as you approach language and do it with
humility.
