WiSe20/21: DD@EL

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Digital Data in English Linguistics: Emotionally loaded language

Course description

This course will be taught online!

Language is not only used to communicate information, but is typically loaded with emotions and the implicit expression of opinions. We find this in euphemisms, in pet names just as in derogatory terms and in insults.

In this course, students will explore central concepts of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and the research on “language and emotion.” We will study real language use, based on authentic corpus data of American English. The participants will define a research question and pursue it in the form of a small corpus-based project.

This course runs in parallel to courses at the University Mainz that also focus on American English usage. If possible, the participants of the courses will present their work in a joint Mainz-Frankfurt Student workshop "Research in English Linguistics" which will take place February 13, 2021. Participation in this workshop is a mandatory course requirement.

The topic of this course is well suited for the oral or written Staatsexamen with Manfred Sailer.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of formal semantics or corpus linguistics.

Registration: by sending an e-mail to Manfred Sailer at [1]

Olat course: to be announced

Free corpus tools

We will be working with the free corpus tools available from http://www.laurenceanthony.net/. In particular:

  • AntFileConverter (to convert pdf files to txt files)
  • AntConc (to get concordanced example sentence, word frequencies, etc.)

Overview of English corpora

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/repository/staff/harrisontilly/corpora-for-workshop/ (many broken links)

http://www.meta.narr.de/9783823369561/List_of_English_language_corpora_CM2015.pdf

English-Corpora.org

URL: https://english-corpora.org


COCA tutorials

BNC

BNCWeb: http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk
Freely usable after registration!

Help with the query language: http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebXML/Simple_query_language.pdf

BNCWeb tutorials