PhD Supervision Interests

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 examining how The Guardian reports on the topic of journalism
Discourses of disease and disaster in American newspapers
Construction of Islam in the BBC sitcom Citizen Khan
Metrosexuality in Malaysia
Discourses of infertility in blogs, news and clinic websites
Ideology and argumentation in Salafi Discourse
Representation of dialect in fiction

Recent PhDs I supervised to completion:
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 in the British and Chinese popular press
Combining corpus approaches and CDA to examine discourses of homophobia in a right-wing political organisation
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-based comparison of two academic books about Wahhabi Islam

Current Teaching

I currently teach various modules in Corpus Linguistics at MA level (on four different schemes), have several PhD students and supervise third year UG dissertations.

Additional Information

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 WordSmith 5 format

BE06 Wordlist in Wordsmith 4 format

BE06 Wordlist in WordSmith 3 format

Current Research

Publications

Books

Baker, P. and Ellece, S. (2011) Key Terms in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.

Baker, P. (2010) Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. More information

Baker, P. (ed.) (2009) Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. London: Continuum. More information

Baker, P. (2008) Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality. London: Exquinox. More information

Baker, P. (2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. More information

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. More information

Baker, P. & Stanley, J. (2003) Hello Sailor! Seafaring life for gay men: 1945-1990. London: Pearson. More information

Baker, P. (2002) Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. London: Continuum. More information

Baker, P. (2002). Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men. London: Routledge. More information

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 Linguisticsand the Journal of Language and Sexuality.

Journal Articles

Baker, P. (2011) 'Times may change but we'll always have money: a corpus driven examination of vocabulary change in four diachronic corpora.' Journal of English Linguistics 39: 65-88.

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 4.1: 125-129.

Chen, Y. and Baker, P. (2010) 'Lexical Bundles in L1 and L2 Academic Writing.' Language Learning and Technology. 14: 2 30-49.

Baker, P. (2010) 'Representations of Islam in British broadsheet and tabloid newspapers 1999-2005.' Language and Politics. 9:2 310-338.

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 asylum 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. (2011) 'Discourse and Gender'. In K. Hyland and B. Partridge. The Continuum Companion to Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum, pp. 199-212.

Baker, P. (2010) 'Corpus Linguistics'. L. Litosseleti (ed) Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum, pp. 93-113.

Baker, P. (2009) 'Issues in teaching corpus-based discourse analysis' In L. Lombardo (ed). Using Corpora to Learn about Language and Discourse. Peter Lang, pp. 73-98.

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) '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.

• Compilation of the AmE06 reference corpus

  01/12/2010 → 01/03/2011
  ... Read more»

• The Daily Telegraph: Google searches 'boost prejudice'

  18/05/2013
  

• Daily Mail: How Google's autocomplete reveals racist, sexist and homophobic searches: Researchers claim search function 'perpetuates prejudices'

  17/05/2013
  

• Paul Baker gives talk at University of Chester

  06/02/2013
  Paul Baker gave a talk to the English department at the University of Chester entitled: Do men all just want the same thing? A corpus linguistics approach to the analysis of gender and desire in perso ... Read more»

• Corpus Linguistics 2013 @ Lancaster - Call for Papers

  03/10/2012
  The seventh international Corpus Linguistics conference (CL2013) will be held at Lancaster University from Tuesday 23rd July 2013 to Friday 26th July 2013. The main conference will be preceded by a wo ... Read more»

• Polari exhibition at the John Rylands Library, Manchester uses Paul Baker's research

  19/09/2012
  The Polari Mission is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between artists and specialists in the fields of linguistics and computer science including Professor Paul Baker (Lancaster University) & T ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives keynote speech at CADS International Conference, Bologna

  14/09/2012
  Keywords: signposts to objectivity? Keywords offer discourse analysts a corpus-driven method of identifying salient lexical items in corpora, thus directing researchers towards interesting discursive ... Read more»

• Postgraduate Conference 2012: Paul is keynote speaker

  13/07/2012
  Paul is invited as keynote speaker to the PG Conference, Lancaster 2012. For details see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/laelpgconference/programme.htm ... Read more»

• Paul Baker interviewed for Radio New Zealand

  16/06/2012
  Paul Baker speaking on Radio New Zealand about Polari, the secret language of gay men. http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2522111/paul-baker-polari ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives talk at the University of Brighton

  07/03/2012
  Paul Baker gave a talk at the University of Brighton on the construction of Muslim women who wear veils in the British press. ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives talk at Lancashire Archives

  25/02/2012
  Paul Baker gave a talk on Polari at the Lancashire Archives, Preston, as part of the LGBT history month. News website: http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/corporate/web/?siteid=4528&pageid=38721&e=e ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives talk at Aston University

  18/01/2012
  Paul Baker gave an invited talk on his research on the representation of Islam in the British press at Aston University. ... Read more»

• Research on representation of Islam in the UK press cited by ENGAGE

  17/11/2011
  A press release summarising research on the representation of Islam and Muslims in the UK press by Paul Baker, Costas Gabrielatos and Tony McEnery has been cited by ENGAGE, a group which aims to promo ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives plenary talk at American Association of Corpus Linguistics conference

  07/10/2011
  Paul Baker gave the opening plenary talk at the American Association of Corpus Linguistics conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The talk was called "Has American English gotten any different? Using the Bro ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives plenary talk at Corpus Linguistics 2011 conference, Birmingham

  21/07/2011
  Paul Baker gave one of the plenary talks at Corpus Linguistics 2011, held at Birmingham University, July 20-22nd. The powerpoint presentation for the talk is here. News website: http://cl2011.org.uk/ ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives talk at Leeds University

  11/03/2011
  Paul Baker gave a talk on the ESRC-funded refugees project at the annual IntelliText workshop at Leeds University. ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives talk at Oxford University

  03/03/2011
  Paul Baker gave a talkto COMPAS (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society) at Oxford University entitled "When is an asylum seeker not an asylum seeker? The representation of immigration in the UK pres ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives talk at British Library

  15/02/2011
  As Part of the British Library's Evolving English exhibition Paul Baker gave a talk entitled: Fantabulosa: Gay languages from Polari to the bear code. ... Read more»

• Paul Baker gives talk at the Imperial War Musuem North

  06/02/2011
  Paul Baker gave a talk on the history and origins of Polari at the Imperial War Museum North. ... Read more»