The Corpus Linguistics Summer School and the Sinclair Lecture are annual events hosted by the Centre for Corpus Research at the University of Birmingham.
In 2021, in response to the pandemic, the Centre transitioned to an online format. This change effectively eliminated the need to limit participant numbers to 50 based on the capacity of computer rooms on campus, significantly expanding both the number and diversity of attendees. This year, 272 participants registered for the summer school, coming mainly from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, as well as smaller numbers from North, South, and Latin America, Australia/New Zealand, and Africa, demonstrating the global reach of the event. The participants also varied in terms of their career stage, including PhD, MA, and undergraduate students, as well as early-career researchers and academic staff members.
I have really enjoyed the Summer School on Corpus Linguistics. . . . [T]he syllabus was quite enriching with a perfect mix of important traditional topics on Corpus Linguistics and current usages of software tools and methods. I am happy that both the asynchronous and synchronous recordings are available for some time even when the school ends.
All 83 participants who responded to our feedback survey indicated that the summer school met their expectations and satisfied their reasons for attending.
This year, the summer school programme included 18 sessions, ranging from introductory topics such as ‘Introduction to Corpus Linguistics’ to more advanced ones like ‘Tagging and Parsing with spaCy’. Sessions also covered the application of corpora in specific research domains (e.g., multilingual law, sign language) and introduced various programmes and methods (e.g., CQPweb, topic models).
While most of the instructors were based in the Department of Linguistics and Communication and the Centre for Corpus Research, we also invited instructors from the Birmingham Medical School and the Department of Modern Languages, along with a guest instructor, Dr Joyce Lim, from Aston University.
Participants also had the opportunity to deliver short presentations on their corpus-based research projects and receive feedback from both us and other participants.
The online format of the summer school has allowed us to reach a large number of participants from around the world. I am excited to see how the insights and skills gained there will shape their future research endeavours.
The annual Sinclair Open Lecture ran within the week of the summer school, and honours the memory of Professor John Sinclair, who, from 1965 to 2000, held the Chair of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham and was an internationally renowned figure in linguistics. For the past several years, the lecture has been scheduled during the Summer School so that the participants of the summer school can also attend the Sinclair Lecture.
This year, it was held on 15th July in person at the Barber Institute and delivered by Professor Dawn Knight from Cardiff University. Her lecture, titled ‘Applying Corpus Linguistics: Impacts of Corpus Research in a Minoritised Language Context,’ showcased the impact of corpus-based applied linguistics through interdisciplinary and cross-institutional research. Professor Knight focussed on Welsh language resources such as the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh, the Geirfan word list, and the FreeTxt toolkit, demonstrating their collaborative development and applicability to other language contexts.
Birmingham Fellow
Biographical and contact information for Dr Akira Murakami, Teaching Fellow in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham.
Reader in Applied Corpus Linguistics
Biographical and contact information for Dr Paul Thompson in theDepartment of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham
