A wide variety of linguists are gathering at Rhodes University’s Department of English Language and Linguistics from 25 to 28 March 2013 for South Africa’s first Corpus Week.  A corpus is a digitized collection of texts that can be used for many different types of research, from dictionary writing to picking out ideologies and analysing them critically.  The aim of the week is to allow experienced corpus linguists and intrigued newcomers to share their knowledge with each other and encourage new research partnerships, according to Sally Hunt, the week’s convenor.

 

Two special international guests are giving workshops during the week: Sylvia Jaworska, a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer from Queen Mary, University of London, and Ramesh Krishnamurthy from Aston University in Birmingham, UK.  Ramesh Krishnamurthy was the Director of the Bank of English, the gigantic corpus used in compiling the first corpus-based series of English dictionaries, the Collins COBUILD Dictionaries.  Sylvia Jaworska is accomplished at using corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to identify ideologies in collections of texts.  She has done extensive work with Krishnamurthy on representations of feminism. 

 

Participants in the week will have plenty of opportunities for networking, as well as workshops on corpus building, applications of corpus linguistics and various software packages that can be used for corpus analysis.  Many of them are postgraduate students, just starting out with corpus linguistics and working on languages ranging from South African Sign Language to Portuguese.  If the excitement at the beginning of this week is anything to go by, then Corpus Week will become an annual event and loads of brilliant insights into the way we use language and texts are on their way.

 

Picture: Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Sally Hunt and Sylvia Jaworska at Corpus Week.