Corpora: MPhil Corpus Linguistics in Birmingham

[Andrius Utka]

Dear colleagues,

I've been recently appointed to the new Chair of Corpus Linguistics at Birmingham University. Ever since John Sinclair laid the foundations of corpus-driven lexicography in COBUILD, the joint venture between HarperCollins and Birmingham University, there has been an internationally renowned corpus research group, which introduced modules of corpus linguistics in postgraduate training, many years ago.

Now that corpus linguistics has come of age, it is time for a broader programme. Please find attached the announcement of our new one-year MPhil degree programme in corpus linguistics. As it is closely linked to our research agenda, our postgraduate students will be invited to align their research with our projects, many of which have a cross-linguistic perspective. This is why we think this course is well suited both to students from overseas and to British students interested in multilingual work.

Our MPhil in Corpus Linguistics acts well as research training preparation for a PhD at Birmingham or elsewhere.

I would like to ask you to display the announcement of the programme at a suitable place (the Word file can be downloaded at http://www.telri.de/current.html).

Alternatively you can find this information at http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/PG/CorpusLinguistics.html). Perhaps you could also mention this course to students interested in corpus linguistics.

As a general rule, applications are submitted in March and April.

All the best,

Wolfgang Teubert
Collins Chair of Corpus Linguistics
Centre for Corpus Linguistics
Department of English
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT
UK
Tel: +44-(0)121-414-5700
Fax: +44-(0)121-414-6053

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The University of Birmingham
Centre for English Language Studies
MPhil(B) Corpus Linguistics

What is an MPhil(B)?

An MPhil(B) is a Master's level programme that combines the benefits of a taught MA and a research
 degree. Students take three taught modules and also write a dissertation of 24,000 words.

Why take a further degree in Corpus Linguistics?

Corpora - large collections of written and/or spoken text stored and accessed electronically - pro
vide a means of investigating language that is of growing importance academically and professional
ly. Corpora are now routinely used in the following fields:
* The production of dictionaries and other reference materials
* The development of aids to translation
* Language teaching materials
* The investigation of ideologies and cultural assumptions
* Natural language processing
* The investigation of all aspects of linguistic behaviour, including vocabulary, grammar and prag
matics

A professional or academic working with corpora needs to have an understanding of the theories and
 assumptions that lie behind corpus building and corpus analysis, the implications of corpora for theories of language, and the range of applications of corpora. This programme is designed to meet
 those needs.

Why study Corpus Linguistics at Birmingham?

The University of Birmingham is one of the leading centres for the study of Corpus Linguistics in Britain. In the 1980s and 1990s it was the home of the Cobuild project, under the direction of Pro
fessor John Sinclair. This project led to the publication of the famous Cobuild dictionaries and g
rammars which are widely used today in English Language Teaching. More recently, the university ha
s established the first (in Britain) Chair in Corpus Linguistics, occupied since June 2000 by Prof
essor Wolfgang Teubert. Professor Teubert is the director of a number of projects in multilingual corpora, including the EU-funded Concerted Action TELRI (Trans-European Language Resources Infrast
ructure).

The School of Humanities offers expertise in the use of corpora in various fields, such as English
 for Academic Purposes (Tim Johns), translation (Philip King), lexicography (Rosamund Moon), histo
rical linguistics (Geoff Barnbrook), literature (Murray Knowles), grammar (Susan Hunston), forensi
c linguistics (Malcolm Coulthard and Sue Blackwell), and the teaching of German (Bill Dodd) and It
alian (Jacqueline Visconti). It also offers expertise in computational linguistics (Oliver Mason a
nd Pernilla Danielsson). In addition, we have close ties to computational linguistics research and
 teaching in the School of Computer Science (main contact John Barnden http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~j
ab).

Students at Birmingham have free access to the 400 million word Bank of English corpus, and to the
 multilingual TRACTOR archive of language resources and tools.

What does the MPhil(B) Corpus Linguistics consist of?

Students take courses amounting to 180 credits. There are three taught modules (20 credits each) a
nd a dissertation (120 credits). The taught modules are:
* Introduction to Corpus Linguistics
* Research Methods in Corpus Linguistics
* Applications of Corpora

The dissertation is written in an area of the student's own choosing.

Who is the programme designed for?

The programme has been designed with three groups of people in mind:
* People who have a professional interest in language, e.g. as teachers or as translators, who hav
e come across the use of corpora in their profession, and who wish to explore this new language-in
vestigation tool further. You may have used corpora extensively in the past, or you may simply hav
e been intrigued by seeing demonstrations of their use.
* People who have studied language at university and who wish to extend this study into a specific
 area with good employment prospects. You may have used corpora as part of your degree, or this ma
y be an area of language study that is new to you but of interest.
* People who have a background in computers and an interest in language, who wish to bring those t
wo areas together in ching, translation, cultural studies and language processing.

All students are expected to be computer-literate, to have an interest in language, and to be aware of what corpora are. No specific expertise in computers or linguistics is required. Applicants should have a 'good' first degree (for British applicants this means a B.A., B.Sc or similar with a 2:1 or higher); applicants who have been educated in a medium other than English will be asked to demonstrate ability in English (e.g. an overall grade of 6 on the IELTS test is taken to be sufficient).

What are the aims of the programme?

The programme has two main aims:
1. To allow students to develop an academic interest in the use of corpora in Applied Linguistics, lexicography, language teaching, translation and language processing.
2. To provide research training in the growing area of Corpus Linguistics, as a basis for more advanced research in this area.
In addition, the programme specifically aims to develop certain abilities:

(i) to design, access and manipulate a large electronic corpus, using current techniques;
(ii) to understand critically current methods and theories of Corpus Linguistics and their relation to language description;
(iii) to use computational and statistical techniques in investigating language corpora;
(iv) to design, carry out, and report on a research project.

What do the taught modules consist of?

Introduction to Corpus Linguistics
This includes: the use of corpus access techniques; interpretation of corpus data; corpus-based theories of language.

Research Methods in Corpus Linguistics
This includes: statistics, programming, corpus collection and research project design.

Applications of Corpora
This includes: corpora in language teaching, translation, cultural studies and language processing.

How is the programme taught (and who teaches it)?

The programme co-ordinator is Susan Hunston. Other members of staff who will contribute to the programme include: Geoff Barnbrook, Pernilla Danielsson, Oliver Mason, Rosamund Moon. The taught modules are taught in small seminar groups. Wolfgang Teubert will supervise and guide the students through the programme, advice them on their research projects and dissertations.

The programme takes 12 months to complete, starting in October. The taught modules run during the
first two semesters, that is, between October and March. The dissertation is completed and handed
in the following September.

How should I apply?

An on-line application form can be found at http://www.bham.ac.uk/admissions/

Or contact Ms Sheila Brady:

Ms Sheila Brady
CELS
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT

Bradysa at hhs.bham.ac.uk

Important note: Read this!

The MPhil(B) in Corpus Linguistics will be offered in the academic year 2001/2002 SUBJECT TO APPROVAL by the Academic Board of the University of Birmingham.