Contact Details
Tel: +44 (0)1524 592442
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Dr Paul Baker
Senior Lecturer
Degree: BSc (Preston), MSc (Lancaster), PhD (Lancaster)
Associated research centres and groups: Gender and Language Research Group, University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL)
Current Teaching
Icurrently teach various modules in Corpus Linguistics at MA level (on four different schemes), have several PhD students and supervise third year UG dissertations.
Research Interests
My research interests include corpus linguistics, language and gender/sexual identities and critical discourse analysis. I am particularly interested in how corpus-based techniques can be used in order to carry out CDA.
Publications
Books
Baker, P. (ed.) (2009) Contemporary Approaches to Corpus Linguistics. London: Continuum.
Baker, P. (2008) Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality. London: Exquinox.
Baker, P. (2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
Baker, P., Hardie, A. & McEnery, A. (2006) A Glossary of Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Baker, P. (2005) Public Discourses of Gay Men. London: Routledge.
Baker, P. & Stanley, J. (2003) Hello Sailor! Seafaring life for gay men: 1945-1990. London: Pearson.
Baker, P. (2002) Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. London: Continuum.
Baker, P. (2002). Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men. London: Routledge.
Journals
I am commissioning editor of the journal Corpora published by Edinburgh University Press.
I am on the editorial board for the Journal of English Linguistics.
Journal Articles
Baker, P. (2010) 'Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English.' Gender and Language. Forthcoming.
Baker, P. (2010) 'Representations of Islam in British broadsheet and tabloid newspapers 1999-2005.' Language and Politics. Forthcoming.
Baker, P. (2009) 'The BE06 Corpus of British English and recent language change.' International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 14:3 312-337.
Baker, P.,Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T and Wodak, R. (2008) 'A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press.' Discourse and Society 19(3): 273-306.
Gabrielatos, C. and Baker, P. (2008) 'Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: a corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylym seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005)' Journal of English Linguistics 36:1 pp. 5-38.
Baker, P. and McEnery, A. (2005) 'A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts.' Language and Politics 4:2 pp. 197-226(30).
Baker, P. Hardie, A. McEnery, A., Xiao, R., Bontcheva, K., Cunningham, H., Gaizauskas, R., Hamza, O., Maynard, D., Tablan, V., Ursu, C., Jayaram, B.D., Leisher, M. (2004) 'Corpus linguistics and South Asian languages: Corpus creation and tool development', Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 19, Issue 4, pp 509-524.
Baker, P. (2004) 'Querying keywords: questions of difference, frequency and sense in keywords analysis.' Journal of English Linguistics. 32: 4 pp 346-359.
Baker, P. (2004) '"Unnatural acts"' Discourses of homosexuality within the House of Lords debates on gay male law reform Sociolinguistics 8:1 88-106.
Baker, P. (2002) 'Construction of Gay Identity via Polari in the Julian and Sandy Radio Sketches,' Lesbian and Gay Review, 3:3: pp 75-84.
Baker, P. (2001) 'Moral Panic and Alternative Identity Construction in Usenet'. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 7:1.
Baker, P. Lie, M., McEnery, A. and Sebba, M. (2000) 'Building a Corpus of Spoken Sylheti', Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 15, Issue 4, pp 419-431.
McEnery, A., Wilson, A.and Baker, P.(2000) 'Language teaching: corpus based help for teaching grammar', Journada de Corpus Linguistics, Volume 6, pp 65-77.
McEnery, A. Baker, P. Gaizauskas, R. & Cunningham, H. (2000) 'EMILLE: towards a corpus of South Asian languages', British Computing Society Machine Translation Specialist Group, London, pp 11-1 - 11-9.
McEnery, A. Wilson, A.and Baker, P. (1997) 'Teaching Grammar Again after Twenty Years: Corpus based help for grammar teaching.' New Approaches to Grammar Teaching, RECALL Journal, Volume 9, Number 2, pp 8-17.
Baker, P., McEnery, A.and Wilson, A. (1995) 'A brief report on a statistical analysis of corpus-based versus traditional human-teaching methods of part-of-speech analysis', Language Testing Update, Issue 18, pp 59-62.
McEnery, A., Baker, P. and Wilson, A. (1995) 'A Statistical Analysis of Corpus Based Computer vs Traditional Human Teaching Methods of Part of Speech Analysis', Computer Assisted Language Learning, Volume 8, Number 2-3, pp 259-274.
Baker, P. (1994) 'Lithium Discontinuation - A meta-analysis.' Lithium.
Book Chapters
Baker, P. (2009) 'Issues in teaching corpus-based discourse analysis' In L. Lombardo (ed). Using Corpora to Learn about Language and Discourse. Peter Lang.
Baker, P. (2009) 'Introduction' In P. Baker (ed) Contemporary Approaches to Corpus Linguistics. London: Continnum, pp. 1-8.
Baker, P. (2009) 'Language and Sexuality'. In J. Culpeper, F. Katamba, P. Kerswill, R. Wodak and T. McEnery (eds) English Language and Linguistics. London: Palgrave, pp. 550-563.
Baker, P. (2008) 'Corpus Linguistics'. To appear in L. Litosseleti (ed) Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum.
Baker, P. (2008) 'Eligible' bachelors and 'frustrated' spinsters: corpus linguistics, gender and language. In J. Sunderland, K. Harrington and H. Stantson (eds) Gender and Language Research Methodologies. London: Palgrave.
McEnery, T. and Baker, P. (2003) 'Corpora, translation and multilingual computing' in F. Zannetin (ed.) Corpora in Translator Education, St. Jerome Press, Manchester.
Baker, P. (2002) 'No Fats, Femmes or Flamers: Changing Constructions of Identity and the Object of Desire in Gay Men's Magazines.' B. Benwell (ed.) Masculinity and Men's Lifestyle Magazines. Sociological Review.
McEnery, A., Baker, P. and Cheepen, C. (2001) 'Lexis, Indirectness and Politeness in Operator Calls.' In C. Meyer & P. Leistyna. (eds.) Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use. Rodopi: Amsterdam.
Singh, S., McEnery, A. and Baker, P.(2000) 'Building a Parallel Corpus of English/Punjabi', in J. Veronis (ed) Parallel Text Processing. Kluwer: Dordrecht, pp 335-347.
McEnery, A.M., Baker, P. andHardie, A. (2000) 'Swearing and Abuse in Modern British English', in B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and P.J. Melia (eds.) Practical Applications of Language Corpora, Peter Lang: Hamburg, pp 37-48.
McEnery, A. and Baker, P. (2000) 'Minority Language Engineering', in B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and P.J. Melia (eds.) Practical Applications of Language Corpora, Peter Lang: Hamburg, pp 411-428.
McEnery, A.M., Baker, P. andHardie, A. (2000) 'Assessing Claims about Language Use with Corpus Data - Swearing and Abuse', in J. Kirk (ed) Corpora Galore, Rodopi: Amsterdam, pp 45-55.
Baker, P. (1997) 'Consistency and Accuracy in Correcting Automatically Tagged Data.' In Corpus Annotation. R. Garside, G. Leech & A. McEnery (eds.) Longman Addison-Wesley, pp 243-250.
McEnery, A.M., Baker, P.& Hutchinson, J.E. (1997) 'A Corpus Based Grammar Tutor'. In R.G. Garside, G.N. Leech & A.M. McEnery (eds.) Corpus Annotation, Longman Addison-Wesley, pp 209-219.
Conference Proceedings
Xiao, Z, McEnery, A, Baker, P and Hardie, A (2004) 'Developing Asian language corpora: standards and practice'. In: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Asian Language Resources, Sanya, China.
Baker, P, Hardie, A, McEnery, T and Jayaram, BD (2003) 'Constructing corpora of South Asian languages'. In: Archer, D, Rayson, P, Wilson, A, and McEnery, T (eds.) (2003) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. UCREL Technical Papers Volume 16. Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University.
Baker, P, Hardie, A, McEnery, AM and Jayaram, BD (2003) 'Corpus data for South Asian language processing'. In: Proceedings of the EACL Workshop on South Asian Languages, Budapest.
Tablan, V., Ursu, C., Bontcheva, K., Cunningham, H., Maynard, D., Hamza, O., McEnery, T., Baker, P. & Leisher, M. (2002) 'A Unicode-based Environment for Creation and Use of Language Resources,' in LREC 2002 Proceedings, pp 66-71.
Baker, P, Hardie, A, McEnery, A, Cunningham, H and Gaizauskas, R (2002) 'EMILLE, a 67-million word corpus of Indic languages: data collection, markup and harmonisation'. In: Proceedings of LREC 2002.
Baker, P, Hardie, A, McEnery, A and Siewierska, A (eds.) (2000) Proceedings of the Third Discourse Anaphora and Reference Resolution Colloquium (2000). UCREL Technical Papers Volume 12 Special Issue. Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University.
McEnery, T., Baker, P., and Burnard, L. (2000) 'Corpus Resources and Minority Language Engineering', in M. Gavrilidou, G. Carayannis, S. Markantontou, S. Piperidis and G. Stainhauoer (eds) Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Athens, Greece, pp. 801-806.
McEnery, A. and Baker. P. (1998) 'Intergrating the Intranet into the teaching of linguistics.' (1998). The Future of the Humanities in the Digital Age. International Conference Bergen, Norway. 138-140.
Potential Doctoral Proposals
PhD Students
Most of my PhD students are involved in corpus linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, language and identities or a combination of these. My current PhD students are working on the following topics:
- a corpus study to compare lexical bundle use of Chinese learners of English with native speakers of English
- a corpus study of keywords to examine gender identity in British and Malaysian children's writing
- the construction of gender identity in Iranian bloggers
- a corpus study of constructions of the media in British newspapers
- a corpus-based comparison of two academic books about Wahhabi Islam, focussing on the use of collocation to create ideology
Recent PhDs I supervised to completion:
- an ethnographic study of an endangered language in Pakistan
- a corpus-based examination of the concept of political correctness in British broadsheet newspapers
- the language of marriage rituals in Botswana
- combining corpus approaches and CDA to examine discourses of terrorism inthe British and Chinese popular press
- combining corpus approaches and CDA to examine discourses of homophobia in a right-wing political organisation
The BE06 Corpus
The BE06 Corpus is a one million word corpus of published general written British English. It has the same sampling frame as the LOB and FLOB corpora. This consists of 500 files of 2000 word samples taken from 15 genres of writing.
Eighty-two per cent of the texts were published between 2005 and 2007, while the remainder were published in 2003-4 and early 2008. The median sampling point is 2006, hence the title BE06 (British English 2006). Link to a pdf of the powerpoint slides for a talk I gave at the Lancaster Corpus Research Group on the corpus (June 16th 2008).
Using the corpus
Due to copyright issues, there are no plans to make the corpus files fully available. However, the corpus has been placed on the CQP (Corpus Query Processor) system at Lancaster University and users can carry out concordances, get distribution information (and eventually have access to collocation information). Contact Andrew Hardie in order to obtain a username and password.
Additionally, the following links give frequency lists of the BE06 in various formats (right click on the link and then save it).
BE06 Wordlist in .txt only format
BE06 Wordlist in WordSmith 5 format
BE06 Wordlist in Wordsmith 4 format
BE06 Wordlist in WordSmith 3 format
ePrints Publications Repository
Paul Baker has 40 publication records in the Lancaster University ePrints repository. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title.
Baker, Paul and Gabrielatos, Costas and Khosravinik, Majid and Krzyzanowski, Michal and McEnery, Anthony M. and Wodak, Ruth (2008) A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society, 19 (3). pp. 273-306. ISSN Online ISSN: 1460-3624 Print ISSN: 0957-9265
Gabrielatos, Costas and Baker, Paul (2008) Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005. Journal of English Linguistics, 36 (1). pp. 5-38. ISSN Online ISSN: 1552-5457 Print ISSN: 0075-4242
Baker, P. and Hardie, A. and McEnery, A. M. (2006) A glossary of Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN 978 0 7486 2018 0
Baker, Paul (2006) Using corpora in discourse analysis. Continuum, London. ISBN 0826477240
Baker, Paul and McEnery, A. M. (2005) A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts. Language and Politics, 4 (2). pp. 197-226. ISSN ISSN 1569-2159
Baker, Paul (2005) Public discourses of gay men. Routledge, London. ISBN 0415349737
Baker, Paul (2004) 'Unnatural acts' Discourses of homosexuality within the House of Lords debates on gay male law reform. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8 (1). pp. 88-106. ISSN 1467-9841
Baker, Paul (2004) Querying keywords : questions of difference, frequency and sense in keywords analysis. Journal of English Linguistics, 32 (4). pp. 346-359. ISSN 0075-4242 (Print) 1552-5457 (Online)
Baker, Paul and Stanley, J. (2003) Hello sailor : a history of sexual identities in the merchant navy. Pearson, London.
Baker, J. P. (2002) Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26180-5
Associated Keywords: Broadcast talk and media discourse, Computer-mediated communication, Corpus linguistics, Critical discourse analysis, Discourse analysis, Language, Language and sexual identities, Language, gender and discourse, Language variation and change, Linguistics, sexuality
View all research activities, news and events associated with Paul Baker.