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New Centre to Change How Language in Society is Researched
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Developing new approaches to the study of hate speech, exploring how people talk about climate change and looking at how changes in corporate governance are communicated will be part of the remit of a new £3.5m research hub at Lancaster University, which will study the use and manipulation of language in society.
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the new Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) will bring the latest techniques in linguistic analysis to bear on a range of questions in the social sciences.
Corpus linguistics is an approach to the study of language that uses computers to permit the analysis of millions of words of data to look for patterns of usage that are not noticeable otherwise. Researchers at Lancaster have been producing pioneering research in this area for over 40 years and it is changing the way language is analysed and how languages are taught.
Corpus linguistics has also profoundly altered how computers can engage with human language and has been significant in many of the most effective language technologies today, such as web searching and voice recognition.
The Director of the CASS, Professor Tony McEnery said: "As the Centre involves all the faculties at Lancaster, it will bring the benefits of the corpus approach to as wide a range of social science disciplines as possible and train a new generation of social sciences researchers to use these techniques.
"This will make a difference to how social science is approached in the UK and will provide insights into key social questions facing the UK today."
Fri 18 January 2013
Latest News
Unborn babies 'practise' facial expressions in the womb
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Story supplied by LU Press Office
Mon 17 June 2013
Lancaster leads the way in cyber security bursary scheme
Lancaster is one of four UK universities selected to take part in an 'industry first' sponsorship initiative encouraging students to take up Masters-level cyber security degrees.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Mon 10 June 2013
Physicists gain insight into the UK's biggest killer
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the UK, accounting for a third of all fatalities through illnesses such as stroke and heart disease.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Wed 29 May 2013
Engineering students make finals of national start-up business competition
Engineering students Scott Nash, Daniel Richardson and Aaron Aboshio have won the northern heat of the Youth Entrepreneurs Scheme 'Engineering YES' competition for their spin-out renewable energy company Atlantis.
Thu 23 May 2013