CRG Timetable - Term 3: 19th April-21st June 2010

wk 21 Monday 19 April 2010

no meeting

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wk 22 Monday 26 April 2010

no meeting

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wk. 23 Tuesday 4 May 2010

Investigation of Situated Discourse Abilities
and Disabilities for Alzheimer’s Patients:
A Corpus-based Contrastive Study

Liu Hongyan
(School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Technology and Business University)

Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative brain disease which has major impairments on cognition and memory. The study on the language of Alzheimer’s patients (AD patients for short) is classified as a cross-disciplinary area, ranging over linguistics, cognitive science, neuropsychology and speech pathology. The study on discourse of Chinese Alzheimer’s patients from linguistic perspective is a brand new field in China.
In contrast to traditional analyses carried out by psycholinguists, neurologists and speech pathologists, with doctor-patient interaction speech samples elicited in clinical settings, the present research, being exploratory in nature, will investigate discernible differences between interactive discourse involving AD patients, and similar discourse involving normal aging speakers of comparable age and circumstances through the study of situated discourse. Such a research is carried out in an attempt to describe how the patients’ situated discourse abilities and disabilities are like.
All data collected both from families and Old People’s House in Beijing have been received and kept in the project known as SCCSD BJ-500 (a Spoken Chinese Corpus of Situated Discourse collected in Beijing for 500 hours) under the auspices of the Chinese Academy and Social Sciences. Data for the analysis consist of recordings and videotapes of conversation recorded in a range of settings which are quite familiar to AD patients and normal aging.
The perspective of pragmatic abilities such as situated discourse abilities is seen as extremely relevant to the nature of interaction in AD patients in that pragmatic theory focuses on dynamic aspects of interaction, which are seen to be vulnerable to AD patients. The characteristics of situated discourse for AD patients are analyzed within a framework of corpus-based study so as to explore the dynamic nature of situated discourse. 
The present study not only makes a valuable attempt to supply a gap in China’s neurolinguistic field but also attempts to illuminate some of the issues involved in cross-disciplinary work and offers beneficial clinical suggestions for speech pathologists working in this field. The ultimate aim in this research is to explore ways for improving the treatment and care of AD patients, as well as providing data to aid diagnosis, especially for the diagnosis for mild AD patients. In addition, this research will hopefully lead to future research on offering practical suggestions for creating positive care-giving moments with AD patients and their families for improving the efficacy of rehabilitation.

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wk 24. (10 May 2010)

Using Chi-square Test in Corpus Studies

Chen Yu Hua
(Lancaster University)

This workshop will be divided into two parts: the first part aims to illustrate the basic rationale behind the chi-square test and the purpose of using it in corpus research, and the second part will be a practical session which allows the participants to try running the chi-square test with online calculators or SPSS.

Corpus studies often involve comparison of certain word/expression uses between different groups of speakers (e.g. male/female or native/non-native). As will be seen, judgment based on examination of raw frequency counts and percentage data is not always reliable. As a remedy, the chi-square test can be conducted in such kind of comparison to determine whether the difference of frequency counts between groups of speakers is statistically significant or a result of chance. Meanwhile, the limitations of chi-square test will be addressed too.

Participants are welcome to bring their own corpus data for the practical session.

Downloads: Demo File (SPSS file).

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wk. 25 Monday 17 May 2010

“Judge Dredd” then and now:A corpus based analysis of a comic strip as it was in 1977 and as it is now

Brian Walker
(Lancaster University)

“Life is harsh in twenty-second-century Mega City One. Atomic wars have devastated the planet, and left it a mean and lawless place. Out of this chaos a radical new system of justice has arisen […] The Judges. They are judge, jury and executioner, and Judge Dredd is the toughest of them all. Judge Dredd is the law!” (2000AD, Prog 2, March 1977).

This is how “Judge Dredd” was introduced to 2000AD readers in March 1977. Since then, “Judge Dredd” has been fighting crime in “Mega City One” every week without a break, making it one of the longest running comic strips in British comic history.

While comic strips have been studied with regard to, for example, literacy practices (e.g. Millard and Marsh 2001), second language learning (e.g. Liu 2004) and, in more general terms, how they ‘work’ through the interaction between the pictures and the words (e.g. Eisner 1996, McCloud 1994, Sabin 1996), by and large, they have been ignored in terms of stylistic analysis (although, Saraceni 2003 usefully adopts some stylistic approaches). In particular very little seems to have been said about the role of the words in comic strips.

This study begins to address that gap by analyzing “Judge Dredd” using corpus approaches. Two small corpora were created : one consisting of the comic strip words from 1977 and the other from 2002. These corpora were tagged (i) manually, to separate the words into text categories, and (ii) automatically, for parts of speech, and were analyzed using Wordsmith (Scott 1996) and Wmatrix (Rayson 2008).

This paper will discuss the findings from this study and show how some of the features of language use for this comic strip have changed over a twenty-five year period. I will also discuss some of the issues arising from using corpus approaches to analyze comic strip data, and how they might be addressed.

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wk. 26 Monday 24 May 2010

CLARET Workshop (Lancaster University)

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wk. 27 Tuesday 1 June 2010

The Construction of Stance in Social Research Interviews.

Greg Myers and Sofia Lampropoulou
(Lancaster University)

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wk. 28 Monday 7 June 2010

Cultural Political Economy and the Financial Crisis: Using Corpus Tools in Analysisng Discourses of Crisis-Management

Michael Farrelly and Bob Jessop
(Lancaster University)

The presenters began their 3-year ESRC-funded research project on the cultural political economy of financial crisis-management in April 2010. Our contribution will: (a) outline the overall research project; (b) explain the role of corpus linguistics in particular and discourse analysis more generally within this context; (c) describe the corpus to be analyzed, how it is being constructed and populated, and our proposed methods of analysis; and (d) indicate the hypotheses to be tested, offer some preliminary evidence that renders them plausible, and present the next steps in the investigation. We welcome general comments on the research project and are particularly keen to receive comments on how to improve the contribution of corpus linguistics within this context.

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wk. 29 Monday 14 June 2010

Content Analysing the Discourse of Altered State

Andrew Wilson
(Lancaster University)

This talk will introduce two computer-assisted content analysis tools for studying the discourse of altered states of consciousness: the Regressive Imagery Dictionary, developed by Martindale (1975), and the Body Type Dictionary, developed by Wilson (2006).  It will explain what altered states of consciousness are, outline the theoretical background of the two dictionaries, and report on some of the validation studies carried out by the presenter.

References:
Martindale, C. (1975). Romantic progression: The psychology of literary history. Washington, DC: Hemisphere.  
Wilson, A. (2006). Development and application of a content analysis dictionary for body boundary research. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 21, 105-110.

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wk. 30 Monday 21 June 2010

The Presentation of Islam and Muslims in the UK press,1998-2009: Identifying topics through detailed wordlist analysis - Joint Session with LIP

Costas Gabrielatos
(Lancaster University)

Corpus-based approaches to critical discourse analysis usually move from establishing large-scale patterns and trends to examination of keywords and/or collocates to close concordance analysis. This presentation will demonstrate how ...

1. detailed concordance analysis can provide the motivation for large-scale analysis;
2. the examination of high-frequency content words (through multi-sorted concordances) can provide strong indications of the main topics in a specialised corpus of newspaper articles;
3. extending the analysis by examining mid-frequency words can provide a more comprehensive picture by establishing groups of words which a) indicate topics, b) specify contextual elements, and c) provide the cotext essential for the discussion of topics.

The analysis forms part of the ESRC funded project, Representation of Islam and Muslims in the UK press, 1998-2009 (PI: Paul Baker; CI: Tony McEnery; RA: Costas Gabrielatos), using a specialised corpus of about 143 million words, containing 200,000 articles related to Islam, Muslims, and their religious
customs and practices published in twelve national UK newspapers over the
last twelve years.

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