In 2011, the departmental symposium was held April 15-17 and was entitled “Exploring the Boundaries and Applications of Corpus Linguistics”.
The Department of English at the University of Alabama is pleased to provide this opportunity for scholars to explore the boundaries and applications of corpus linguistics, especially its relationship with and application to neighboring disciplines such as cognitive linguistics, comparative linguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, historical linguistics, language learning/teaching, literary analysis, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and writing (both academic and creative).
Keynote speakers
Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics, Brigham Young University
Speech title: “Change then and change now: Mapping linguistic changes in English with the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English”
Professor Davies is the author of more than fifty publications on corpus design and use (including many studies on using corpora to look at changes in morphosyntax), and has received several large grants from the US government (National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation) to design and create large historical corpora. He is the creator of several corpora at corpus.byu.edu, which are used by 70,000-80,000 unique users every month. These include the 420 million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990-2010), the new 400 million-word Corpus of Historical American English (1810-2009), the 100 million-word TIME Corpus (1920s-2000s), our interface to the British National Corpus, the Corpus del Español, and the Corpus do Português.
Stefan, Th. Gries, Professor of Linguistics, University of California at Santa Barbara
Speech title: “Marrying corpus linguistics with cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics: Some whys and hows”
Professor Gries is a quantitative corpus linguist at the intersection of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, who uses a variety of different statistical methods to investigate linguistic topics such as morpho-phonology, syntax and the syntax-lexis interface, semantics, first and second language acquisition, as well as corpus-linguistic methodology. Theoretically, he is a cognitively-oriented linguist (with an interest in Construction Grammar) in the wider sense of seeking explanations in terms of cognitive processes. Professor Gries has published extensively including three authored books and three co-edited books on cognitive linguistics/corpus linguistics, as well as numerous articles in leading journals in his specialization areas and other linguistic areas. Professor Gries is also the founding editor in chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, associate editor of Cognitive Linguistics, and performs editorial functions for Constructions and Frames, Language and Cognition, and CogniTextes.
Michaela Mahlberg, Associate Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Speech title: “Corpus Stylistics: What a corpus approach can tell us about fictional worlds”
Professor Mahlberg specializes in corpus-based discourse and literary analysis. Her publications include two authored books English General Nouns: a Corpus Theoretical Approach and Text, Discourse and Corpora: Theory and Analysis (jointly with M. Hoey, M. Stubbs and W. Teubert) and three co-edited books, as well as many book chapters and journal articles. She is the editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins), and co-editor of the series Corpus and Discourse (Continuum). She is currently finalizing a book on Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction (Routledge).