Event Details

This free event will introduce the Written British National Corpus 2014 and offer a series of mini lectures from leading experts in Corpus linguistics.

The British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014) is a major project led by Lancaster University. We created a 100-million-word corpus (a large collection of ‘real life’ language) of present-day British English. This corpus can be used by researchers to understand more about how language works and how it is evolving. Educators, dictionary compilers and the interested public will also be able to access the corpus to find usage examples of modern British English in different genres.

The Spoken part of the corpus (10 million words) has already been released. We will be officially releasing the written part of the corpus (90 million words) on 19th November via #LancsBox X, a software package developed at Lancaster University. This will complete the BNC2014 project.

Programme:

12.00-12.30 Online programme: Lancaster Corpus Linguistics

12.30 – 12.45 Vaclav Brezina (Lancaster University): Welcome and Introduction to the event

12.45 – 12.50 Elena Semino (Lancaster University): Welcome from the Director of The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS)

12.50 – 12.55 Paul Connolly (Lancaster University): Welcome from the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS)

12.55-13.00 Break

13.00 – 13.15 Tony McEnery (Lancaster University): The idea of the written BNC2014

13.15 – 13.30 Dawn Knight (Cardiff University): Building a National Corpus: The story of the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh

13.30 – 13.45 Vaclav Brezina (Lancaster University): Current British English

13.45 – 14.00 Vaclav Brezina and William Platt (Lancaster University): Exploring the BNC2014 using #LancsBox X

14.00 – 14.15 Randi Reppen (Northern Arizona University): Corpora in the classroom

14.15 – 14.30 Alice Deignan (University of Leeds): Corpora in education

14.30-14.45 Dana Gablasova (Lancaster University): Corpus for schools

14.45 – 15.00 Bas Aarts (University College London): Plonker of a politician NPs

15.00 – 15.15 Break

15.15-15.30 Marc Alexander (University of Glasgow): British English: A historical perspective

15.30 -15.45 Michaela Mahlberg (University of Birmingham): Corpora and fiction

15.45 – 16.00 Martin Wynne (University of Oxford): CLARIN – corpora, corpus tools and collaboration