Several members of the Centre for Corpus Research will be presenting their most recent work at the 39th International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) conference.

The conference takes place from 30 May – 3 June 2018, and this year’s theme is ‘Corpus Linguistics and Changing Society’. Established in 1977 in Oslo, ICAME once was a ‘closed’ conference that could only be attended by invited participants, but it has since become one of the main annual corpus linguistic conferences. This year the conference is hosted by the University of Tampere in central Finland.

The presentations by our corpus linguists display an exciting variety and reflect the breadth of research carried out at CCR. The topics range from exploring gender in 19th century children’s literature, deception in online reviews, and diachronic move analysis to grammar studies looking at genitive alternation as well as the diachronic development of the verb ‘get’.

  • Dr Anna Cermakova, in collaboration with Professor Michaela Mahlberg,  will introduce the GLARE project and speak on “Gender representation in 19th century children’s literature”.
  • Dr Jason Grafmiller’s talk on “Variable cues vs. multiple grammars: Genre specificity in the English genitive alternation” will examine variability in the genitive alternation across five written genres of 20th century American English.
  • Professor Jack Grieve and Dr Nicholas Groom will give a talk on “Analysing change in a corpus of patents using move analysis and edit distance”. They will discuss move analysis  – a methodology for describing the rhetorical structure of texts – and introduce a novel method for quantifying the degree of change over time.
  • Dr Florent Perek, in collaboration with Professor Martin Hilpert from the University of Neuchâtel, will give a talk with the title:  “On the history of permissive ‘get’ in American English: New quantitative evidence”.
  • And finally, Olu E Popoola and Professor Jack Grieve will present a paper that will be of interest far beyond linguistics: “Dimensions of deception: Using multi-dimensional analysis to detect fake online reviews”.

You can find the book of abstracts here.

There will be a lot to look forward to! For up-to-date conference coverage follow us @CCR_UoB and look for #ICAME39.