Corpus Linguistics Workshop Opening Event - Talk by Dr Paul Thompson

The Corpus Linguistics Workshop 2014/2015 Opening event  will take place on Friday, 24th October, 3:00pm at Trent A35. We are pleased to have guest speaker Dr Paul Thompson from the University of Birmingham (also see the poster). The talk will be followed by a drinks reception.

Abstract:

"It is generally accepted now that many real-world problems are best addressed by a number of disciplines working together rather than by individual disciplines alone. In the UK, research councils promote interdisciplinary research activity, and universities in turn encourage academics to collaborate with colleagues in other disciplines. In order to facilitate effective communication between such researchers, we believe that it is important to develop a fuller description of what the distinctive features of discourse practices in interdisciplinary research are and of how they differ from discourse practices in conventional disciplines.

As a step toward this goal we are investigating the discourse of a successful journal in an interdisciplinary field: Global Environmental Change (GEC). We are investigating the extent to which this field operates as a unified whole, the extent to which journal authors in the field broaden their messages to a multidisciplinary audience, and the extent to which each discipline in the field maintains a discrete identity.

One of the challenges of investigating interdisciplinary research discourse is to find ways to categorise texts - within an interdisciplinary journal, for example, are some articles more 'interdisciplinary' than others? Are some papers more typical of one or another discipline involved than of others? Typically, in corpus building, texts are classified by external criteria, but in this project, after the initial choice of texts in given journals, we approach the categorisation, or clustering of texts within the corpus through text-internal features, using Multidimensional Analysis."

For more information and upcoming events, please visit the Corpus Linguistics Workshop website.