Interview with Elena Semino

In 2023, the Sydney Corpus Lab is pleased to be featuring edited extracts from Dr Robbie Love’s CorpusCast podcast about corpus linguistics. In each blog post published throughout the year, we present the answers of leading corpus linguists to three questions. Specifically, all blog posts present answers to the following two questions: Posts from episodes…

Interview with Paul Baker

In 2023, the Sydney Corpus Lab is pleased to be featuring edited extracts from Dr Robbie Love’s CorpusCast podcast about corpus linguistics. In each blog post published throughout the year, we present the answers of leading corpus linguists to three questions. Specifically, all blog posts present answers to the following two questions: Posts from episodes…

2022: The Year in Review for the Sydney Corpus Lab

written by Monika Bednarek As 2022 is drawing to an end, here’s the year in review from the Sydney Corpus Lab. This year, we were able to start a number of new informal collaborations with corpus linguistic and sociolinguistic centres and labs in Australia and overseas, including the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Corpus Research,…

Topic modelling in spontaneous speech data

written by Marcel Reverter-Rambaldi The development of large-scale linguistic corpora has broadened greatly the scope of research that can be done into language. Projects including the Language Data Commons of Australia and Sydney Speaks demonstrate the value that is placed on comprehensive collections of language data. As corpora continue to grow in scale, the benefit…

First Nations people in Australian print news: Insights from prepositional collocates

written by Carly Bray The findings of the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, published more than 30 years ago, noted widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream media representation of First Nations people among these communities. In the years since then, First Nations groups have developed a range of reporting guidelines which outline preferred and dispreferred…

Australian newspapers react to chaos: Using corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse Australian media reporting on the January 6th capitol attack

Written by Raphael Lo Schiavo-Rega Like many people across the English-speaking world, the January 6th capitol attack (Image 1) both surprised and intrigued me. I was especially interested in the reaction of the media, and the wildly different representations created of the event by mouthpieces on both sides of the American political chasm. It made…

The 2014 Israel–Gaza Conflict: Exploring the representation of ‘Israel’ in the Israeli media using a triangulation of corpus-based critical discourse analysis and discourse-based interviews

Written by Keren Greenberg For my recently completed PhD research at the Swinburne Institute of Technology, I used corpus based critical discourse analysis to explore how ‘Israel’ was represented in the Israeli media during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict – a 50-day round of violence that took place between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas in…

New book announcement

The Sydney Corpus Lab is excited to announce the publication of a new book by Sydney Corpus Lab affiliate A/Prof Nicole Mockler: Constructing Teacher Identities: How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and Their Work Constructing Teacher Identities: How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and Their Work provides a comprehensive and systematic…

Constructing the corpus of Science Fiction Anime dialogue (SciFAn)

by Kelvin K.-H. Lee For my recently-completed PhD thesis, I combined corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics to investigate characterisation through the use of first-person pronouns in Japanese animation, i.e. anime (see Figure 1). To do so, I first had to design and build my own specialised corpus of anime dialogue – namely, the corpus of Science…