Language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once. (Sinclair 1991: 100)

Every corpus that I’ve had a chance to examine, however small, has taught me facts that I couldn’t imagine finding out about in any other way.  (Fillmore 1992: 35)

A single text on its own is quite insignificant: the effects of media power are cumulative, working through the repetition of particular ways of handling causality and agency, particular ways of positioning the reader. (Fairclough 1989: 54)

The Edge Hill University Corpus Research Group (EHU CRG) was established in October 2021 by Costas Gabrielatos. EHU CRG aims at becoming an interdisciplinary forum for academics and students who are (interested in) using corpora and corpus linguistic approaches. In particular, it aims at encouraging and facilitating the use of corpus approaches at Edge Hill University. The EHU CRG website also hosts the Bibliography of Discourse-Oriented Corpus Studies.

As corpus linguistics is essentially a methodological approach which integrates quantitative and qualitative techniques, it can be employed by academics engaged in any type of research involving the analysis of naturally occurring or elicited language (such as Education, History, Law, Linguistics, Literature, Politics, Psychology, Sociology). Also, its computational and quantitative aspects make corpus linguistics relevant to academics working in Computing and Statistics.

If you are interested in presenting at EHU CRG, or you would like to be informed about future events, please contact the co-ordinator. EHU CRG will also feature invited presentations and demonstrations.

Meetings will have a variety of formats (presentations, demonstrations, workshops, discussions), and will focus on a number of issues:

  • Corpus tools.
  • Corpus compilation.
  • Methodological issues (e.g. automated or manual analytical techniques, metrics).
  • Corpus linguistics theoretical constructs.
  • Findings of completed or ongoing research projects (including PhD and MRes projects).
  • Critical examination of published studies.

Meetings will take place online on Microsoft Teams. The online format will enable a much larger number of academics and students from around the world to attend and contribute. Meetings will be 1-2 hours depending on the type and number of speakers, and will allow ample time for discussion.

Currently, the plan is to have two meetings per semester, but additional meetings can also be arranged.