University of Bergen, 3rd-7th December 2007

Language corpora play an increasingly important role in linguistic research. For several decades, corpus linguistics has allowed for systematic investigations into the ways in which language users exploit their linguistic resources. A variety of different approaches to language can be taken on the basis of language corpora, including investigations of synchronic variation in the use of linguistic features, the study of historical language processes, assessing how foreign learners perform in a second language, etc. Language corpora also play a crucial role in language technology as providers of data on which models of spoken and written language can be based. Moreover, corpora are today widely used as bases for lexicography and terminology purposes.

The aim of this course is to describe the use of corpora from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint. It will include a general presentation and discussion of the theoretical fundaments of corpus linguistics, including the empirical potential and limitations of corpus methodology, issues such as representativity and so on. The course will also describe the practical application of corpus-linguistic method in analytical scientific work and will give a general account of how corpora can be used for advanced research purposes.

Special attention will be devoted to various ways of applying corpora for

• the use of corpora to study spoken language, including phonetic aspects;
• the use of the web as a corpus and existing web-based corpora;
• the use of corpora in studies of historical linguistic phenomena;
• the use of corpora for lexicographic and terminological purposes.

The course is intended for PhD scholars, and it is relevant not only to researchers who consider themselves 'corpus linguists' but more generally to anyone interested in how to reach practical results in advanced research on the basis of spoken or written data. Hence, the course is open anyone who studies language data from a sociolinguistic, language historical, terminological/lexicographical, computational/technological, or other viewpoint. The five-day course is arranged at the University of Bergen by UNIFOB's Section for Culture, Language and Information Technology (Aksis).

Adam Kilgariff has a background as a computational linguist. He is currently Director of Lexical Computing Ltd and Lexicography MasterClass Ltd, in addition to his role as Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex. Until 2004 he was Senior Lecturer at the Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Brighton. His research interests include automatic and semi-automatic lexical acquisition from corpora, and the web as a corpus. He has studied the structure of the lexicon and lexical resources, how lexicographers write dictionaries, how they determine what meanings a word has, and how this relates to theoretical discussions of ambiguity and computational work on word sense disambiguation.

Anke Lüdeling is Assistant Professor in Corpus Linguistics at the Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests include historical corpus linguistics, word formation, morphological productivity and morphological change. She is currently involved in the project DeutschDiachronDigital, which is compiling a large historical corpus of German language from its beginnings up to 1900. Earlier she has been involved in the Verbmobil project. She is also editor of the Handbook on Corpus Linguistics, to be published in 2007.

Magnar Brekke is a Professor of English language at the Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business and Administration. His academic interests include corpus analysis, terminology and knowledge management, text linguistics and machine translation. He has initiated the project KB-N (Knowledge Base for Norwegian), which develops technology for the semi-automatic extraction of terminology on the basis of a bilingual corpus of Norwegian and English text in the domain of business and finance.

Jon Erik Hagen is an associate professor at the Department of linguistic, literary and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen. His research field is Norwegian as a second language.

Hilde Hasselgård is a professor of English linguistics at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo. She has worked with both monolingual and multilingual corpora in her research, particularly with the English-Norwegian Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus, which are held at the University of Oslo, and were also (mainly) developed there. Her research is functionally oriented, and research topics include meanings and functions of adverbials as well as word order and thematic structure in English and Norwegian. She is a member of the research group "Språk i Kontrast" (SPRIK).

Reidunn Hernes is a Lecturer in Norwegian language at Bergen College. She has a PhD in sociolinguistics in which she studied variation in the spoken dialect of youths from the village of Os outside Bergen. She is experienced in the use of corpora for practical research purposes, including the compilation, transcription and search in spoken corpora.

Gjert Kristoffersen is a Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Bergen. His research field is phonology, especially the prosody and tonal accents of Norwegian. He is currently involved in an international network of phoneticians who develop a methodology for the use of corpora to study phonetic variation.

A substantial part of the program is allocated to tutoring. Candidates are welcome to submit PhD project proposals or thesis sections in advance. These will be circulated to the course presenters for evaluation and comments. The candiate will be asked to give a 15-minute presentation of the project, follwed by a discussion.

To register for the course, send an e-mail to CL07@aksis.uib.no. Deadline: 9th November 2007. Deadline for submitting project proposal: 19th November 2007.

The organizing committee consists of Gisle Andersen, Gjert Kristoffersen and Knut Hofland.