Written by Annabelle Lukin (Macquarie University) and Rodrigo Araújo e Castro (Macquarie University and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais) The Sydney Corpus Lab is pleased to announce a new corpus, the Macquarie Laws of War Corpus, developed to promote research collaborations in the field of international war law. While corpus linguistics has been a technique…

By Matteo Fuoli and Monika Bednarek In recent years, there has been growing interest within corpus linguistics in triangulating data and/or methods. This includes combining multiple corpus linguistic techniques, or integrating corpus linguistic analysis with other research methods and data such as interviews or experiments. To make a contribution to this area of corpus linguistics,…

The Sydney Corpus Lab is pleased to announce a new research collaboration on the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA). This project is funded through the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and led by Professor Michael Haugh from the University of Queensland. It builds on our existing collaboration on the Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP)….

As 2021 is coming to a close, here’s the year in review for the Sydney Corpus Lab. A quick note about some recent changes: Project manager Georgia Carr is stepping down from her role at the end of this year to focus on completion of her PhD thesis. You can still use our email address…

by Catherine Travis The links between language and society have been well recognised in over 50 years of research in sociolinguistics. This endeavour was spearheaded by William Labov, who established a role for social meaning in sound change in his classic study of vowel realisations on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts (Labov 1963)….

Written by Simon Musgrave Data is becoming increasingly important in today’s world, so corpus linguists might feel that the rest of the world is finally catching up. But the rest of the world are bringing with them new approaches to how data is handled. This means that fields such as corpus linguistics may need to…

In this blog post, we look back at the history of corpus linguistics in Australia, through the recollections of Emeritus Professor Pam Peters (Macquarie University). 1. How and when did you first get involved in corpus linguistics? During the 1980s, there was growing interest in Australian English at large, following publication of the first Macquarie…

by Monika Bednarek What linguistic awareness do viewers have about the dialogue they encounter while watching fictional, English-language television series? This is a question I asked in my 2018 book with regards to speakers of English as a foreign language. Part of this corpus linguistic study of television dialogue included a questionnaire with almost 600…

By Alexandra García & Joshua Badge In 2019, The Australian, one of the few remaining national newspapers in Australia, came under scrutiny because of its biased and harmful representation of transgender people. On social media, critics highlighted the use of alarmist headlines, misleading information and the exclusion of transgender voices. As one parent told ABC…

We are very pleased to announce the print publication of a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (IJCL) on “Corpus approaches to telecinematic language”, guest edited by Monika Bednarek, Valentin Werner and Marcia Veirano Pinto. The articles in this special issue share a common focus on analysing language use in film/television per…