Pre-conference workshops

A total of four pre-conference workshops took place:

Workshop I: Are there monolingual corpora? (Computer says no.)

Convenors: Arja Nurmi & Päivi Pahta (University of Tampere) 

The monolingual ideal has permeated most branches of linguistics, also corpus linguistics, for a long time. It is time to question this, and look at our data with fresh eyes. Are the corpora presented as monolingual really such? What kind of multilingual elements do corpora contain? How are multilingual elements in spoken and written texts dealt with in corpus design and coding? What kind of challenges do they pose for corpus linguistic research, and what kind of new avenues do they open up? In the field of historical corpus linguistics multilingual practices have already been investigated from various perspectives for a decade, but there is less work on present-day data, apart from a growing interest in corpus-based research on Anglicisms. The workshop offers perspectives from corpus compilation and annotation to corpus-based research and from historical to present-day data.

Workshop II: Corpus linguistics and linguistic innovations in non-native Englishes

Convenors: Sandra C. Deshors (Las Cruces), Sandra Götz (Giessen) & Samantha Laporte (Louvain-la-Neuve) 

In line with the current effort of corpus linguists to reduce the existing paradigm gap between EFL (i.e., foreign English variants) and ESL (i.e., indigenized English varieties), this workshop focuses on the investigation of linguistic innovations across the two non-native English variants.

Workshop III: Words, Words, Words – Lexis, Corpora and Contrastive Analysis 

Convenors: Signe Oksefjell Ebeling (University of Oslo) & Thomas Egan (Hedmark University College)

Continuing the tradition of contrastive pre-conference workshops at ICAME, this year's edition comprises papers relevant to the general conference theme as seen from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of parallel (translation) or comparable corpora. Papers at the workshop compare English with a range of languages: Czech, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish.

Workshop IV: The future of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – New challenges, new developments

Convenors: Robert Fuchs, Ulrike Gut (University of Münster) & Gerald Nelson (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

This workshop will provide a venue for discussing current issues in the compilation and use of (subcorpora of) the International Corpus of English. Papers at the workshop address the following topics: 

  • how the (meta)data available in existing ICE subcorpora can be used to address new questions,
  • how new corpus compilation techniques can make corpus collection more efficient or reliable, and permit the analysis of more language features than has been possible until now,
  • how the ICE project can address recent change in how English is used around the world (such as across the ESL-EFL continuum and on the internet)