[Corpora-List] Birmingham short courses

Wed May 14 12:34:13 UTC 2003

Centre for Corpus Linguistics & Dictionary Research Centre
Department of English
University of Birmingham

Two Short Courses: September 2003

1. Using Corpora in Language Research

Monday 8 - Wednesday 10 September 2003

Course Tutors: Pernilla Danielsson & Wolfgang Teubert
Keynote Speakers: Bill Dodd, Susan Hunston & John Sinclair

Corpus linguistics means working with real language data. The Birmingham
Centre for Corpus Linguistics is offering a 3-day-course on using
corpora in language research. This course will not only give you an
introduction to the present state-of-the-art in corpus linguistics, it
will also show you how you can use corpus research in a wide variety of
other contexts: discourse analysis, translation studies, language change
& data-driven lexicography.

Alongside with the general introduction, there will be practical
hands-on sessions where participants will be given the opportunity to
work with our many monolingual and multilingual resources. This includes
the 450 million word Bank of English, the largest regularly updated
corpus for the English language, and a range of parallel corpora,
consisting of between 1-10 million words of original text aligned with
its translated texts, including language pairs such as English-French,
English-Chinese, English-Swedish, and German-French.

The course is aimed at (current and prospective) postgraduate students,
researchers and language teachers, as well as professionals in the
language and translation industries.

This course can be linked to our second short course, Meaning and
Dictionaries: see below.

Course Programme:

Monday 8 September

9.30 - 10.00  Welcome (WT)
10.00-11.00  Discourse, meaning and reality (WT)
Coffee & Tea
11.30-13.00  Hands-on session (TBC)
Lunch
14.00-15.30  Keynote Lecture: Susan Hunston
Coffee & Tea
16.00-17.30  Hands-on session (PD)

Tuesday 9 September

9.30 -11.00  Analysing Frequency Data (PD)
Coffee & Tea
11.30-13.00  Hands-on session(PD)
Lunch
14.00-15.30  Keynote Lecture: Bill Dodd
Coffee & Tea
16.00-17.30  Hands-on session (BD)

Wednesday 10 September (will run partially in conjunction with the
course below)

9.30 -11.00  Lecture (WT)
Coffee & Tea
11.30-13.00  Hands-on Session (TBC)
Lunch
14.00-15.30  Keynote Lecture: John Sinclair
Coffee & Tea
16.00-17.00  Round-up

2. Meaning and Dictionaries

Wednesday 10 - Friday 12 September 2003

Course Tutors: Rosamund Moon & Elizabeth Potter
Keynote Speakers: John Sinclair: 2nd speaker to be confirmed

Course Description:

dictionary, n. A book that lists words and their
meanings: If you don't know what it  means,
look it up in a good dictionary!

We all know that dictionaries are much more than this - yet meaning is
still the most prominent part of dictionary entries. Users consistently
give 'meaning' as the commonest reason for using a dictionary. And for
lexicographers, the task of identifying different meanings, analysing
meaning, and then providing clear definitions or appropriate
translations is not only fundamental to the lexicographical process but
hard.

This short course will provide participants with an opportunity to
reflect on how dictionaries deal with meaning. We will explore different
aspects of meaning through a series of sessions which will be both
intensive and interactive - including hands-on work with corpus data.
Most of the sessions will be in seminar/workshop format, but there will
be two keynote lecturers from guest speakers (to be announced).

The course is aimed particularly at researchers in lexicography and at
professional lexicographers in the early stages of their career,
although we welcome applications from anyone in related fields or with
general interests in lexicography. We will be dealing with both
monolingual and bilingual aspects of meaning.

This course can be linked to our first short course, Using Corpora in
Language Research: see above.

Course Programme:

Wednesday 10 September (will in run in conjunction with the above
course)
9.30-10.00  Welcome and Introduction
10.00-11.00  What dictionaries do with meaning
Coffee & Tea
11.30-13.00  What linguists say about meaning
Lunch
14.00-15.30  Keynote Lecture: John Sinclair
Coffee & Tea
16.00-17.30  What corpus data shows about meaning

Thursday 11 September
9.30-11.00 Meaning across languages (equivalents & translation; meaning
in learners' dictionaries)
Coffee & Tea
11.30-13.00 Context and phraseology (relationship between collocation
and meaning; lexical units; multi-word items)
Lunch
14.00-15.30  Defining meaning (definitions in monolingual dictionaries)
Coffee & Tea
16.00-17.30  First meanings first (ordering meanings; historical aspects
of meaning)

Friday 12 September
9.30-11.00 Culture and connotation (cultural aspects of meaning;
connotation v denotation)
Coffee & Tea
11.30-13.00 Restricting meaning (context labels, register, technical
senses and terms)
Lunch
14.00-15.30  Keynote lecture (speaker to be confirmed)
Coffee & Tea
16.00-16.30  Round up
17.00-17.30  Farewells

(Timings and topics are provisional.)

Further Information

Venue: CETADL, Guisbert Kapp Building, University of Birmingham

Fee: Participation per person: GBP 525 including coffee breaks, lunches
and course dinner. Reduction in fee to GBP 450 for early registration
before July 31. For participants wishing to participate on both courses,
the total costs is GBP 825, with a reduction to GBP 700 for registration
before July 31.

Accommodation: Participants are requested to make their own
reservations: suggestions will be provided. We recommend Lucas House
(University Guest House situated 5 minutes walk from the course venue)
for accommodation (cost per person, per night, single occupancy: GBP
51.97). Tel no: +44 (0)121 625 33 83 Fax no: +44 (0)121 414 6339

Further Information: More information about the courses and how to
register can be found on our website: http://www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/.
Information on how to reach us can be found on the website:
http://www.location.bham.ac.uk/. The main university web site may also
provide you with useful information: http://www.bham.ac.uk.