Conferences

Pre-conference Workshops

There will be six pre-conference workshops for ICAME 35, held on Wednesday, April 30 (13.00 - 17.15), following the registration. The workshops are also open to day-delegates; please register through the online shop.

All workshops will be held at the Humanities Building (No. 55 on the campus map).

Workshop 1

Cross-linguistic perspectives on verb constructions
 Workshop convenors  Workshop summary

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling
(University of Oslo)
s.o.ebeling@ilos.uio.no

 

Hilde Hasselgård
(University of Oslo)
hilde.hasselgard@ilos.uio.no

Before the conference a special workshop will be organized on cross-linguistic perspectives on verb constructions. Much corpus-based contrastive work has already been done on various aspects of the verb phrase, including tense/aspect/modality constructions, multi-word verbs, verb complementation and phraseological patterns of verbs. By focusing on the (extended) verb phrase, we hope that the workshop will illuminate this area by means of comparisons with different languages and with different corpora.

All abstracts [PDF format]

    

 Time Title
 Speaker Institution
13.00-13.10 Welcome Signe Oksefjell Ebeling & Hilde Hasselgård University of Oslo
13.10-13.40 English translations of Norwegian infinitival complement constructions Thomas Egan
Hedmark University College
13.40-14.10 Looking for the difference in our silences: A corpus-based approach to object omission in English and Spanish Tania de Dios
University of Santiago de Compostela
14.10-14.40 Past-referring verb constructions in English, Norwegian and German: a contrastive look
Johan Elsness
University of Oslo
14.40-15.10
Cross-linguistic perspectives on the verbs of putting in English and Swedish: Contrasts in construction and semantic composition
Åke Viberg
Uppsala University
15.10-15.40
 Coffee break
15.40-16.10
Evidential passive constructions in English and their equivalents in Lithuanian Anna Ruskan
Vilnius University
16.10-16.40 Come running: the construction ‘lexical verb + -ing participle’ in a contrastive perspective
Markéta Malá
Charles University in Prague
16.40-17.00 Discussion and closing of workshop
Signe Oksefjell Ebeling & Hilde Hasselgård University of Oslo

Workshop 2

Corpus-based approaches to discourse relations
 Workshop convenors  Workshop summary

 

 

Kerstin Kunz
(University of Heidelberg)
kerstin.kunz@iued.uni-heidelberg.de

 

Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski
(Saarland University)
e.lapshinova@mx.uni-saarland.de 

In recent years, more innovative methods of corpus-based analysis are used to investigate relations on the level of text or discourse. The workshop is organised with a focus on these new approaches and will include methods of corpus exploitation, e.g. (semi-)automatic identification of discourse relations, as well as new methods of statistical evaluation (e.g. multivariate statistical analysis).

The papers presented will report on finalised studies or on work in progress. They will cover a variety of discourse phenomena such as cohesion and coherence, information structure and information packaging. The variation investigated will concern intra-lingual variation between registers and between written and spoken language, contrasts between several languages and differences between translations and originals.

The workshop will end with a final discussion. It will mainly revolve around the question of how different aspects of discourse can be analysed in combination, both from the perspective of data exploration and data interpretation:

  1. Which categories have to be defined? How many levels of analysis are needed? Which relations between which elements are concerned?
  2. What are the dependent and what are the independent variables?
  3. Which tools are best for semi-automatic extraction? Which tools can be combined?

Time
Title Speakers Institution
13.00-13.15 Introduction

13.15-13.45 “Anaphoric Expressions in Parallel Czech-English Data” Michal Novák and Anna Nedoluzhko Charles University, Prague
13.45-14.15 “Local Coherence by Abstract Anaphors - a Comparative Survey” Heike Zinsmeister University of Hamburg
14.15-14.45 “Discourse-level Features for Statistical Machine Translation” Thomas Meyer Idiap Research Institute, Martigny
14.45-15.15 “Language Means Expressing Discourse Relations in Written and Spoken Czech” Magdaléna Rysová Charles University, Prague
15.15-15.30 COFFEE BREAK
15.30-16.00 “Discourse Organization: Genre, Coherence, and Lexical Cohesion” Ildikó Berzlánovich Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
16.00-16.30 “Diachronic register diversification in the use of interpersonal features in theme position” Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb Saarland University, Saarbrücken
16.30-17.00 “Global discourse structures, rhetorical relations and thematic patterns in English and Spanish
journalistic texts: a comparative study”
Julia Lavid and Lara Moratón Universidad Complutense de Madrid
17.00 Discussion and round-up

 

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Workshop 3

Perfect and perfectivity re-assessed through corpus studies
Workshop convenors  Workshop summary

 

 

 

Elena Seoane
(University of Vigo)
elena.seoane@uvigo.es

 

Cristina Suárez-Gómez
(University of the Balearic Islands)
cristina.suarez@uib.es

 

Valentin Werner
(University of Bamberg)
valentin.werner@uni-bamberg.de

 

 

 

While the area of the present perfect has always been a hotly contested ground, recent corpus-analyses have shown that grammatical variation in this realm in English is far more pervasive than has been assumed. This is particularly true when non-native and learner Englishes are taken into account (cf. Davydova 2011; Elsness 2009a, 2009b; Hundt and Smith 2009; Miller 2000, 2004; Seoane and Suárez-Gómez 2013; Suárez-Gómez and Seoane 2013; van Rooy 2009; Werner 2013; Yao and Collins 2012). These studies have addressed the issue from diverse theoretical perspectives and methodologies and using different approaches, both function-to-form and form-to-function, in an attempt to account for the envelope of variation under scrutiny.

This workshop is open to synchronic, diachronic and contrastive corpus-based research on the expression of the present perfect and the perfective in both native and non-native varieties of English. We especially welcome contributions which go beyond the traditional ascription of the perfect to the construction have + past participle for the expression of perfect meaning (Quirk et al. 1985: 192-195; Biber et al. 1999: 467; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 143) and observe variation determined by sociolinguistic variables such as mode, dialect, style, register, genre as well as by the individual interpretation of what the ‘perfect time span’ means (Rothstein 2008), especially in cases in which there is no explicit time frame specification from a temporal adverbial.

We also want to motivate participants to foster discussion about how these new findings from data analyses help to shed light on theoretical issues such as the grammaticalization of some adverbs as perfect markers (e.g. just, yet, (n)ever, cf. Miller 2004), the implications behind the apparent reversal of the long-term shift towards analyticity of other Germanic languages observed in the retreat of the present perfect in English (cf. Ten Cate 2005: 5; Elsness 2009b: 242; Van Rooy 2009: 311-312; cf. Hundt and Smith 2009), the role of register in historical variation and change (cf. Elsness 2009b; Biber and Gray 2013), the potential role of language contact as a driving force in the innovations attested in the use of the present perfect and its different variants (Mair 2013) and the repercussions of corpus linguistics research on the teaching of English as a second language.

Full workshop description including abstracts (PDF format)

(Note: exact timings might be subject to change)
Time Topic focus Title Speaker Institution
12.00-13.00

 LUNCH

13.00-13.05

WORKSHOP OPENING

13.05-13.25 The present perfect puzzle On the perfect-evidential-link in Continental Scandinavian Björn Rothstein University of Bochum
13.25-13.45 Cross-variety comparisons The perfect in English-lexifier pidgins and creoles Stephanie Hackert LMU Munich
13.45-14.05 Cross-variety comparisons The frequency of the present perfect in varieties of English around the world  Robert Fuchs  University of Münster
14.05-14.25 Cross-variety comparisons The present perfect in New Englishes: Common patterns in the situations of language contact Julia Davydova University of Mannheim
14.25-14.45 The perfect in individual varieties The sociolinguistics of the Australian English innovative present perfect: Methodological considerations Sophie Richard University of Western Australia
14.45-15.00

 COFFEE BREAK

15.00-15.20 The perfect in individual varieties The perfect form and its meanings in Black South African English Bertus
van Rooy
North-West University
15.20-15.40 The perfect in individual varieties Constraints on the use of the perfect in Ghanaian English: A comparative sociolinguistic approach Gloria Otchere University of Oslo
15.40-16.00 The perfect in Irish English The present perfect and perfectivity and Irish Standard(ised) English: A re-assessment John Kirk Independent Scholar, Belfast
16.00-16.20 The perfect in Irish English Perfects and perfectivity in two contact varieties of English Markku Filppula University of Helsinki
16.20-16.40 The perfect in Irish English/
historical aspects
The impact of migration on the tense and aspect system of nineteenth-century Irish English correspondents Marije
Van Hattum
Liverpool Hope University
16.40-17.00 Historical aspects Speakers have a construction used – Speakers have used a construction: The construction HAVE + past participle in Old English – resultative or perfect? Berit Johannsen FU Berlin
17.00

END OF WORKSHOP

 

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Workshop 4

Statistics in corpus-based sociolinguistics: A practical workshop
 Workshop convenor  Workshop summary







Vaclav Brezina

(Lancaster University)

v.brezina@lancaster.ac.uk

 

This workshop will discuss different statistical procedures available for analysis of sociolinguistic data in large language corpora. I will demonstrate that the traditional approach of using aggregated data with the log-likelihood statistic is in principle unreliable. Instead, the workshop will offer suggestions for alternative methodologies and statistical procedures, which take into account within group differences and therefore produce more meaningful results.
As part of the workshop, a new research tool BNC64 Search & Compare will be introduced. BNC 64 Search & Compare can carry out detailed analyses based on a socially-balanced spoken corpus BNC64 (1.5 million words). BNC 64 represents the speech of 64 speakers – 32 men and 32 women – extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC). BNC64 Search and Compare is a web-based environment that creates simple visualisations, calculates statistics and produces concordances. The website was created to allow for easy visualisations of complex corpus data and easy testing of a number of different sociolinguistic hypotheses.
The workshop will be structured around a series of practical exercises guiding the participants through different types of analysis of corpus data and statistical procedures.
The following areas will be covered:

  1. Sociolinguistic data in language corpora
  2. Descriptive and inferential statistics
  3. Individual and social variation
  4. The null-hypothesis testing paradigm and the “new” statistics
  5. Statistics covered: Log-likelihood, Mann-Whitney U test, Spearman’s rank correlation, Confidence Intervals, Robust mean difference, Robust Cohen’s d

The workshop does not require any prior knowledge of statistics. It will be of interest to anyone who wants to explore sociolinguistic data using language corpora.

More detailed information about the workshop can be found at this website.

Time: 13.00 - 15.00

 

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Workshop 5

The Corpus Stylistics Workshop
Workshop convenors Workshop summary

University of Nottingham:

Michaela Mahlberg michaela.mahlberg@nottingham.ac.uk

Peter Stockwell peter.stockwell@nottingham.ac.uk

Rein Sikveland Rein.Sikveland@nottingham.ac.uk

This workshop aims to contribute to the growing area of research that employs corpus linguistic methods in the study of literary texts. The papers in the workshop address research questions in 'corpus stylistics' from a variety of angles: with a focus on literary effects, differences between genres, literary translation, cognitive approaches and the reading experience.

The workshop will also present corpus software that is specifically designed to support the analysis of literary texts.  

(Note: exact timings might be subject to change)
 Time Title Speakers 
13.00-13.15 Introduction to Workshop
13.15-13.45 “Serious vs. popular fiction: Contextualising commonalities and differences” Rocio Montoro
13.45-14.15 “Verbs of Remembering and Forgetting in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons: A Corpus-Informed Stylistic Analysis” Ernestine Lahey
14.15-14.45 “The application of principal component analysis to literary translations. Comparing the Italian translations of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” Lorenzo Mastropierro
14.45-15.15 COFFEE BREAK
 
15.15-15.45 “Keyword and cluster analysis in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and literary interpretation of the novel” Anna Cermakova
15.45-16.15 “The corpus stylistic analysis of prose fiction” Dan McIntyre & Brian Walker
16.15-16.45 “Psycholinguistic methods to study the reading of
Dickens’s characters”
Kathy Conklin
16.45-17.15 “CLiC Dickens: Towards a cognitive corpus stylistics of characterisation” Michaela Mahlberg, Peter Stockwell & Rein Sikveland
17.15 Discussion and round-up

 

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Workshop 6

Health communication and corpus linguistics: Examining health discourse through the use of specialised corpora
Workshop convenors Workshop summary

University of Nottingham:

Kevin Harvey
Kevin.Harvey@nottingham.ac.uk

Gavin Brookes
Gavin.Brookes@nottingham.ac.uk

 

Electronic corpora are being harnessed by scholars of health communication now more than they ever have been. Corpus-assisted research into health communication has developed significantly over the last 15 years and continues to develop apace. This workshop will add to this burgeoning field of corpus-based health communication research through a series of talks which demonstrate how the analysis of corpora containing health-related communication from a wide variety of contexts (such as spoken interviews, email and electronic support group fora) can provide exciting and unique insights into the way people communicate about their subjective health experiences. A key theme addressed in this workshop is the power of the corpus to challenge researcher intuition and provide novel insights into people’s subjective experiences of health-related issues; findings which can, and have in the past, help to inform clinical decision-making and treatment-planning in real-world therapeutic contexts.

 

Title Speakers
A Journey into the unknown: Early insights into what corpus linguistics and the internet can tell us about Diabulimia Gavin Brookes & Kevin Harvey 
Evidence-based health communication?: Examples from a corpus of depression support group messages Daniel Hunt
Using corpus annotation tools to explore the effects of a healthcare intervention for families of deaf children Luke Collins
Linguistic analysis of the preschool five minute speech sample: What the parents of preschool cildren with erly signs of ADHD say and how they say it? Elvira Perez, Melody Turner, Anthony Fisher & David Daley
A corpus linguistics approach to the language of online self-help in mental health Paul Bonham

 

 

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Conferences

The University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham
NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5900
telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5924
email: ICAME2014@nottingham.ac.uk