PhD research studentship at the University of Sheffield

[Claire Cowie]

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The following PhD research studentship has been advertised at the University
of Sheffield, UK:

The emergence of new genres at the end of the twentieth century: innovation
and text type in the British National Corpus

The project will examine change in genre and the emergence of new genres or
text types towards the end of the twentieth century, by analysing stylistic
features of texts that can be found in the British National Corpus (BNC).
The BNC is a 100 million word collection of tagged electronic texts (1975 -
1994), which includes written and spoken English, from a variety of formal
and informal contexts.

The discipline of English historical linguistics has become increasingly
concerned with text type, due to the way that searchable electronic corpora
enable us to quantify the use of features across many texts. Historical
corpora have been used to demonstrate how the use of a stylistic feature in
a text type can change over time, or how a whole text type can change. These
developments have been traced for historical corpora which either cover
earlier stages in the language only or cover long stretches of time, not
observing the twentieth century in any kind of detail. Research on
developments in the English language using the BNC is still relatively new.

The aims of the project might be variously interpreted as:
-     identifying the use and frequency of certain stylistic features in
text types of the BNC
-      providing a description of those text  types in terms of an
oral/literate dimension
-     comparing findings for text types in the BNC to descriptions of text
types based on historical corpora
-      providing an account of stylistic change over the 20 year period of
the BNC

Arrangements for supervision
The successful candidate will be a member of the Department of English
Language and Linguistics which forms part of the School of English. The
project will be jointly supervised by Dr Claire Cowie and Dr Claire Warwick
from the department of Information Studies. Dr Cowie works on word-formation
and lexical innovation in historical corpora, with particular reference to
register differences. Dr Warwick works on humanities computing, with a
particular interest in the application of computers to the study of English
literature and language. She was previously part of the BNC project team.
More information about the departments may be found at:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/D-H/ell and http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is.

Requirements
Applications are sought from candidates with a linguistics background at
undergraduate or master's level. Knowledge of subjects such as stylistics,
corpora, register studies, discourse analysis, text analysis, retrieval and
markup is desirable, but in-depth knowledge of all areas is not compulsory,
and any necessary training will be provided. The precise areas studied and
approach taken to the investigation is negotiable depending on the
successful candidate's particular interests and capabilities. The
studentship is restricted to applicants from the EU.

The deadline for submitting applications is the 31st of January 2001.
Application forms and further details can be obtained from:

Fozia Yasmin, Graduate Research Office
Graduate Research Office
156 Broomspring Lane
Sheffield S10 2FE
Tel: +44 (0) 114 222 1404
Fax: +44 (0) 114 222 1420
Email : grad.school at sheffield.ac.uk

To discuss the project informally, please contact Claire Cowie (0114
2220217- c.s.cowie at sheffield.ac.uk) or Claire Warwick (0114 222 2632 -
c.warwick at sheffield.ac.uk).