We are very pleased to announce the publication of a special issue of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics on “Corpus Linguistics and Education in Australia”, guest edited by Alex García, Peter Crosthwaite, and Monika Bednarek. The issue involves Sydney Corpus Lab members and affiliates as editors and authors: In ‘Ten years of print media…

About this time last year, when I was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University, I attended the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Symposium (28 June 2019). Among many interesting talks, Jonathan Culpeper presented some first results from his Shakespeare project, comparing the ten most frequent trigrams…

We’re delighted to announce that two new PhD students are joining the Sydney Corpus Lab. Melissa Kemble, who continues to work at Macquarie Dictionary, started her PhD earlier this year, extending her work on the representation of female athletes in the Australian news media. You can read a short summary of her previous work in…

When commencing my master’s dissertation, I knew I wanted to investigate media representations of female AFL players. I was curious to know how journalists portrayed the new women’s league, and how their messages were being conveyed in their reporting. I had a notion of analysing for appraisal, but I also wanted to avoid ‘cherry-picking’ examples…

It was after attending an International Women’s Day event in 2019, where I heard journalist and feminist Jane Gilmore speak about her project ‘FixedIt’ – an initiative that corrects victim-blaming headlines in news articles on violence against women (VAW) –  that I knew I wanted to focus my dissertation on how the Australian media reports…

We’re excited to announce that the University of Sydney, Australia and the University of Lancaster, UK have signed an MOU agreement to work on collaborative research in corpus linguistics. This new partnership builds on existing connections between the newly established Sydney Corpus Lab and the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), which was…

Welcome to the 2019 review of the Sydney Corpus Lab! It’s certainly been a very eventful year – in mid-March we officially launched the lab, with the help of international visiting scholars Laurence Anthony, Elena Semino, Tony McEnery, Paul Baker, and Gavin Brookes. The launch event involved a 2-day showcase/workshop in corpus linguistics (‘Discover the…

The Sydney Corpus Lab recently presented a timeline that attempts to trace the development of large computer corpora of modern Australian English. This blog post provides further details and includes links for accessing the corpora. The first sample corpus of Australian English, the Australian Corpus of English (ACE), was compiled by Pam Peters, Peter Collins,…

How are we faring in the development of Australian corpora? It is fair to say that there is scope for improving our grounding in empirical data both in the study of Australia’s Indigenous languages, as well as in studies of Australian English.  For researchers in Indigenous languages, the ARC Centre for the Dynamics of Language…

Corpus analysis tools such as Antconc or WordSmith Tools have revolutionized the way we view and study language. By exploring frequency lists, concordances, collocations and keywords we can learn a great deal about the way language patterns across texts, registers and genres. There are, however, linguistic phenomena that do not lend themselves very easily to…