Contact Details

Tel: +44 (0)1524 592254

Room: Bowland College, B99a

Office Hour: Term I: Monday 11-12, Friday 10-11

Dr Sebastian Hoffmann

Sebastian Hoffmann worked in Linguistics and English Language until August 2009.
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Sebastian Hoffmann

Lecturer in English Language

Degree: MA (Zurich), PhD (Zurich)

Associated research centres and groups: University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL)

Current Teaching

I'm currently teaching on the following courses:

LING 130 (term 1)
LING 133 (term 2)
LING 203 (term 1 - seminar only)
LING 313 (term 2)
RIAL workshop in corpus linguistics (term 2)

Research Interests

Sebastian Hoffmann received his doctoral degree from the University of Zurich, where he also worked for several years - first as a research assistant to Prof. Gunnel Tottie and then as a lecturer. As a dedicated corpus linguist, his research predominantly focuses on the application of usage-based approaches to the study of language. Recent research topics include:

Syntactic change (e.g. the grammaticalization of complex prepositions)
the historical development and present-day use of tag questions in British and American English
verb complementation (in particular ditransitive verbs) in British and Indian English
corpus linguistic methodology, in particular the methodological and practical issues involved in using Internet-derived data for corpus linguistic analyses
aspects of fixedness (e.g. collocations)

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I'd be happy to supervise research that involves the quantitative analysis of authentic language data, particularly in the following areas:

Language change (particularly syntactic change)
Grammar
Corpus linguistic methodology

List of publications

Books:

Hoffmann, Sebastian, Evert, Stefan, Smith, Nicholas, Lee David YW and Ylva Berglund Prytz. 2008. Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb—a Practical Guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (Sample: Chapter 1)

2005. Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions. A Corpus-Based Study. London: Routledge.

Journal articles, book chapters, etc:

Forthcoming. "Lexical Change." In: Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill & Ruth Wodak (eds.) English Language and Linguistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

2007. "Processing Internet-Derived Text - Creating a Corpus of Usenet Messages." Literary and Linguistic Computing 22:2. 151-65.

2007. "From Web-Page to Mega-Corpus: The CNN Transcripts." In: Marianne Hundt, Nadja Nesselhauf and Carolin Biewer (eds.) Corpus Linguistics and the Web. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 69-85.

2006. "Tag Questions in Early and Late Modern English" Anglistik 17:2. 35-55.2004.

2004. "Are Low-Frequency Complex Prepositions Grammaticalized? On the Limits of Corpus Data - and the Importance of Intuition." In: Hans Lindquist & Christian Mair (eds.). Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 171-210.

2004. " Using the OED Quotations Database as a Corpus - a Linguistic Appraisal." ICAME Journal 28. 17-30.

2002. "In (Hot) Pursuit of Data: Complex Prepositions in Late Modern English." In: Pam Peters, Peter Collins, & Adam Smith (eds.). New Frontiers of Corpus Research. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 127-146.

With collaborators:

Hoffmann, Sebastian & Stefan Evert. 2006. "BNCweb (CQP-Edition) - The Marriage of Two Corpus Tools." In: Sabine Braun, Kurt Kohn & Joybrato Mukherjee (eds.) Corpus Technology and Language Pedagogy: New Resources, New Tools, New Methods. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 177-195.

Hoffmann, Sebastian & Hans Martin Lehmann. 2000. "Collocational Evidence from the British National Corpus." In: John Kirk (ed.). Corpora Galore: Analysis and Techniques in Describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 17-32.

Hoffmann, Sebastian, Hans Martin Lehmann & Gunnel Tottie. 2001. "The Student as Corpus Linguist." In: Guy Aston and Lou Burnard (eds.). Corpora in the Description and Teaching of English. Bologna: CLUEB. 118-32.

Hoffmann, Sebastian & Joybrato Mukherjee. 2007. "Ditransitive Verbs in Indian English and British English: A Corpus-linguistic Study". AAA ¬- Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik. 32:1. 5-24.

Lehmann Hans-Martin, Peter Schneider & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2000. "BNCweb." In: John Kirk (ed.). Corpora Galore: Analysis and Techniques in Describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 259-266.

Locher, Miriam & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2006. "Constructing the Identity of an Advice-Giver in an American Internet Advice Column." Text & Talk 26:1. 67-104.

Mukherjee, Joybrato & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2006. "Describing Verb-Complementational Profiles of New Englishes: A Pilot Study of Indian English." English World-Wide 27:2, 147-173.

Smith, Nicholas, Sebastian Hoffmann & Paul Rayson. 2008. "Corpus Tools and Methods, Today and Tomorrow: Incorporating Linguists' Manual Annotations." Literary and Linguistic Computing. 23:2. 163-180.

Tottie, Gunnel & Sebastian Hoffmann. Forthcoming. "English Tag Questions - The first Centuries." Accepted for publication in Journal of English Linguistics.

Tottie, Gunnel & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2006. "Tag Questions in British and American English." Journal of English Linguistics 34:4. 283-311.

Tottie, Gunnel & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2001. "Based on: From Dangling Participle to Complex Preposition." In: Karin Aijmer (ed.) Studies in English Linguistics. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. 1-12.

Reviews:

Smitterberg, Erik. 2005. "The Progressive in 19th-Century English." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8:1. 146-52.

Electronic publications:

BNCweb Manual - A detailed description of BNCweb, with examples and methodological tips (together with Ylva Berglund, Oxford University, David Lee, Nagoya University of Commerce & Business, and Nicholas Smith, Lancaster University).

Unpublished manuscripts:

Tottie, Gunnel, Sebastian Hoffmann & Hans Martin Lehmann. 1999. "Bigger is Better. Using the British National Corpus for Undergraduate Term Papers."

BNCweb

Sebastian Hoffmann is a co-author of BNCweb, a user-friendly web-interface to the British National Corpus. BNCweb can be accessed for free via a server at Lancaster University. URL for sign-up: http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebSignup/.