The Fourth Sinclair Open Lecture, 6 May 2004

Supported by sponsorship from CfBT

Saying something new: the hidden patterns in corpora, Professor Michael Hoey (University of Liverpool)

Corpus analysis normally attends to the repeated pattern as evidence of normal use in language. Linguistic theory has historically attended to unique, sometimes bizarre, examples that bear little or no resemblance to natural usage. The corpus analysts criticize the theoretical linguists for the impoverished nature of their data, while theoretical linguists accuse corpus linguists of being unable to account for creativity in language. In this lecture I want to draw upon the ground-breaking work of John Sinclair in the area of description of the lexical item to suggest a theoretical response to the theorists. In particular, I want to argue that if collocation, colligation and semantic preference (in my terms, semantic association) are given a psychological twist, one can actually account for much creativity in language better than the traditional linguist.

Using the psychological notion of priming, I shall argue that the patterns in corpora revealed by Sinclair and his colleagues and associates can be seen as default choices that each user may on occasion override as long as other default choices of the same kind are conformed to. The properties of the lexical item are the driving force of creativity and not, as might be imagined, in contrast to it. Data will be taken from creative mistakes made by ordinary users and from highly acclaimed writers such as Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas. In particular I shall look at 'First Sight', a poem by Philip Larkin memorably analysed in 1966 by John Sinclair in an article entitled 'Taking a Poem to Pieces', and will suggest how it might be taken to pieces almost forty years on, using the corpus linguistic concepts he and others have developed.

English Literature seminars summer 2004

• Frances Wilson (Reading University), Harriet Taylor and the Death of Romanticism
• Gregory Dart (University College London), Leigh Hunt and Literary Skimpolism
• David Amigoni (Keele University), Samuel Butler and Writing Evolutionary Theory
• Ruth Kinna (Loughborough University), Peter Kropotkin and Ernest Belfort Bax: the clash of ideologies

English Language events summer 2004

• BAAL Corpus SIG Meeting - a one-day meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Corpus Special Interest Group (SIG)
• Introduction to Perl Programming and manipulating authentic language data
• The design and management of corpora - a three-day short course in association with the Tuscan Word Centre
• Workshop on Evaluation, Stance, Authorial Voice and the Implied Respondent - a two-day workshop covering recent developments in the Appraisal framework, Hunston's theory of status and value, and Biber's corpus-based approach to styles of stance.
• Phraseology and Metaphor in EAP - Professional Issues Meeting of the British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP)
• Language, meaning and reality - Colloquium
• Language Teaching and Integrational Linguistics - the Third International Conference of the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication (IAISLC)
• Using a Corpus in Learning and Teaching English for Academic Purposes - a three-day course held at the Centre for Corpus Research focusing on how a corpus can be used to support teaching and learning in EAP.
• International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis  - a five-day course providing a detailed introduction to forensic linguistic analysis and the language of the law
• The Seventh Birmingham English Language Postgraduate (BELP) Conference

English Literature research seminars Spring 2003

• John Jowett, Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More
• Samantha Skinner, Pig Cupid and the Rag-picker: The Urban Wasteland in the Poetry of Mina Loy and the Short Stories of Anais Nin
• Simon Goulding, Mapping the Minds of the Men at the Midnight: Hamilton and Orwell
• Tory Young (Anglia Polytechnic University), Michael Cunningham's The Hours: Woolf and the Death of the Author
• Massimo Bacigalupo (University of Genoa), Italian Perspectives on English Romanticism
• Nick Cappas, Austen's Artistry: A Dramatic Approach to Character and Dialogue
• Marie Brown, Dickens' Truman Show
• Elaine Jackson, Who's Afraid of Berta Ruck
• Richard Espley, Djuna Barnes's "nice word beast"
• Geoff Barnbrook, Johnson as a prescriptive lexicographer: the case for the prosecution
• Anne McDermott, Johnson as a prescriptive lexicographer: the case for the defence

English Language research seminars Spring 2004

• Peter White, Attitudinal meaning and inference - semantic prosodies in text and inter-text
• Marcus Walsh, Christopher Smart's use of multiple, fused, allusive metaphor in his mid-18th-c religious verse.
• Alice Deignan (University of Leeds), Corpus-based approaches to Metaphor
• Graham Low (University of York), Metaphorical models of language teaching
• Peter White, Attitudinal meaning and inference - semantic prosodies in text and inter-text
• Norbert Schmitt (University of Nottingham), The Nottingham Project: The acquisition of lexical clusters
• John Barnden (School of Computer Science), Computational approaches to metaphor
• Michael McCarthy (University of Nottingham), Hyperbole
• Geoff Barnbrook, Johnson as a prescriptive lexicographer: the case for the prosecution
• Anne McDermott, Johnson as a prescriptive lexicographer: the case for the defence
• Philip King, Metaphor in translation

English postgraduate seminars Spring 2004

• David Oakey, Multi-word items in research articles: work in progress
• Susan Hunston (Academic Advisor), Writing a Literature Review.
• Monika Bednarek, Conceptual Metaphors in Newspapers
• Wolfgang Teubert, Corpus linguisitcs and hermeneutics: The importance of intertextual references
• Lucy Fraser
• Michael Toolan, ‘And she writes well…’: some thoughts on the importance of style and structure in your thesis.
• Frank Liang, Scoring EFL essays with latent semantic analysis
• Chris Kennedy, Managing your Viva
• Efi Karaouza, Al-Hussayyen: Innocent or Guilty? A study on three linguistic devices that journalists use in order to form public opinion.
• Oliver Mason, Using Statistical Methods
• Stamatia Spiliopoulou, Building a Parallel Corpus of English and Greek European Parliament Reports
• Rosamund Moon, Metaphor and Dictionaries
• Tony Bastow, 'Our journey in a landscape of new threats': metaphor in the DoD corpus.
• Almut Koester, Qualitative and quantitative methods in spoken discourse analysis.
• Lorraine Adriano, Mis-translation and representation
• Corony Edwards, What counts as research?
• Satoko Takami, A lexical comparison between newspaper sub-corpora in the Bank of English
• Jeannette Littlemore, Identifying metaphor in discourse and investigating students' metaphor processing techniques.
• Crayton Walker, ‘I run the Department’: Collocations which affect international mergers.
• Dr Valerie Youssef (University of West Indies), Researching English in the Caribbean: the Creole/English interface
• Guo Xiao Tian, Tracing the development of an English learner’s interlanguage -- A Case Study
• Pernilla Danielsson, Pursuing the search for prefabricated units in texts

The Sixth Birmingham English Language Postgraduate (BELP) Conference, 22 September 2003

• Tony Bastow, Welcome and introduction
• Suganthi John, Languages for specific purposes
• Veronica Ormeño, Tailored Strategy Training: A Case Study Approach
• Crayton Walker, Factors influencing the collocational behaviour of business English nouns.
• Nelya Koteyko, English borrowings in Russian business-related lexis: (potential) ‘false friends’
• Ramona Tang, Child language, adverbs, evaluation
• Sue Blackwell, Pronouns in autistic motherese
• Alison Johnson, Eliciting, clarifying and upgrading utterances in interviews with children
• Satoko Takami, Tabloid adverbs and broadsheet adverbs in the Bank of English
• Maggie Charles, Evaluation in report sources: disciplinary differences in theses
• Nicholas Groom, Corpus, ideology, gender
• Minhee Bang, How we see the world: a corpus-based study of the representation of North Korea and the United States in the South Korean press
• Tony Bastow, ‘Friends and allies’: binomials in a corpus of US defence speeches
• David Oakey, Some Phraseological Behaviour of Academic Vocabulary in Academic Discourse*
• David Oakey, Multimodality, vagueness and Joanna Channell
• Raymond Yee, East meets West: discourse and perceptions about the Chinese
• Jess Shapero, Vagueness in suicide notes
• Guest speaker: Joanna Channell ‘Applying a linguist’: commercial language consultancy and research

English Literature research seminars Autumn 2003

• Emma Carroll, Emigration in Gaskell's Mary Barton
• Marie Brown, Disfiguring Dickens: A Re-assessment of Dickens's Relation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood'
• Mike Davis, Gothic's Enigmatic Signifier: The Case of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla"
• Maureen Bell, How to be offensive with Books
• Greg Lynall, "Tailor", "Conjuror" and "Workman in the Mint": Swift's Caricatures of Newton'
• Stefka Ritchie, On Johnson
• Steve Ellis, Virginia Woolf and the Construction of the Victorian
• Anna Burrells, Modernist Bodies
• Talk on publishing led by Rhian Williams
• Wolfgang Teubert, The diachronic dimension of the discourse. A pandemic of plagiarism
• Marcus Walsh, Go Figure: Metaphors of Textuality

English Language research seminars Autumn 2003

• Jeannette Littlemore, Figurative thought and communicative language ability
• Susan Hunston, Conflict and Consensus: construing opposition in Applied Linguistics
• Malcolm Coulthard, On the definition and detection of plagiarism
• Dr Frank Boers (EHB, Belgium), Using cognitive semantics and dual coding for comprehension and retention of idioms
• Charles Owen, Fairclough (1993) 'Marketization of Public Discourse' - Revisited.
• Oliver Mason, Automatic extraction of linguistic information from text corpora
• Wolfgang Teubert, ‘The diachronic dimension of the discourse. A pandemic of plagiarism’
• Marcus Walsh, ‘Go Figure: Metaphors of Textuality’
• Sara Mills (Sheffield Hallam University),  Gender and politeness
• Bill Louw, Expanding the parameters of collocational markedness.

English Language postgraduate seminars Autumn 2003

• Crayton Walker, Announcements & Introductions
• Susan Hunston, What to expect from the Academic Advisor, the Mentor, and your Supervisor: the 'architecture' of research degree support.
• Jian Luo, Sight and Psyche – On the Opening Passage of Conrad’s The Secret Sharer
• Pernilla Danielsson, Putting the Idiom Principle to the test Part 1
• Xiao Tian Guo, Between Verbs and Nouns and Between the Base Form and the Other Forms of Verbs – A Contrastive Study into COLEC and LOCNESS
• Charles Owen, Methodologies and why we need them
• John Ataya, Translation Process as Cognitive Behaviour - Thinking Aloud Experiment.
• Sue Blackwell, Data, statistics, significance using the CHILDES corpus.
• Juliet Herring, Blood, Sex and the Body: a Corpus Linguistic Approach to the Study of Vampire Literature
• Pernilla Danielsson, Putting the Idiom Principle to the test Part 2: Findings and Discussion.
• Lexi Don and Peter White, Some things you may have wanted to know about systemic functional linguistics but were afraid to ask.
• Nuria Guerra Bernal, The Use of Terms of Address in Conflictive situations. A Contrastive Analysis
• Alison Johnson, Ask Me a Story: Pragmatic effects of and- and so-prefaced questions in formal police interviews with adult defendants and child witnesses
• Frances Rock, Much More Than Message-Mediation: Appropriating Institutionally Salient Talk
• Lucy Fraser, A Narrative Analysis of the Films of David Lynch.
• Dorota Pacek, Translating An Ambivalent Text: Problems and Solutions
• Malcolm Coulthard, Do's and Don't's (discuss) of giving a conference paper
• Tony Bastow, 'Friends and Allies’: Binomials in a Corpus of US Defence Speeches
• Nick Groom, Evaluative Adjectives in Book Review Articles: A Comparative Corpus Study
• Martin Hewings, Getting published (mainly for new research students)
• Lorena Suárez Tejerina, Approaching evaluation through an emerging genre: A contrastive study of English and Spanish book reviews.