
Robbie LoveAston University · School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Robbie Love
Doctor of Philosophy
About
43
Publications
5,393
Reads
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566
Citations
Introduction
I am a researcher in English language and applied linguistics, with a specialism in corpus linguistics. I apply corpus methods to explore how English is used in a range of contexts, including casual conversation and public communications.
Additional affiliations
July 2017 - January 2018
February 2018 - February 2020
Education
October 2014 - February 2018
October 2013 - September 2014
October 2010 - July 2013
Publications
Publications (43)
This paper introduces the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, an 11.5-million-word corpus of orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers of British English from across the UK, recorded in the years 2012-2016. After showing that a survey of the recent history of corpora of spoken British English justifies the compilation of this ne...
This study examines the pragmatic functions of fuck among British English teenagers in casual conversation in two youth language corpora from the 1990s and 2010s. It applies a corpus-pragmatics approach to explore how the ongoing weakening of the taboo strength of fuck in the perception of young speakers is realised in usage data. The major functio...
This paper investigates changes in swearing usage in informal speech using large-scale corpus data, comparing the occurrence and social distribution of swear words in two corpora of informal spoken British English: the demographically-sampled part of the Spoken British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2...
Over the decades, technological advancements have substantially improved the efficiency and scope of spoken corpus compilation, but there remain many challenges ––both practical and theoretical–– that constrain 1) the quality of spoken corpus data, 2) the scale to which spoken corpora can be compiled, and 3) the authenticity with which spoken langu...
This chapter brings together the overall findings of the book and summarises its key points.
This chapter focuses on reading as a coping strategy. We first draw on the relationship between reading and wellbeing and examine some of the ways that reading has been known to have therapeutic value. We then examine how participants reported their use of reading as a positive coping strategy, analysing the reasons they provided for why they turne...
This chapter examines how participants in our data reported returning to books that they had previously read which offered familiarity, reliability, and nostalgia and thus provided a coping mechanism. The chapter begins with a survey of the latest research in re-reading as a phenomenon, drawing on theoretical and empirical studies that have sought...
This chapter examines a number of related issues and findings concerned with the social aspect of reading and how the pandemic may have altered the ways that participants accessed books and discussed their reading with others. We first explore both the personal and social practices of reading, examining what we know about reading in social contexts...
This chapter examines how participants reported that the lockdown period had affected the amount that they read. We begin by providing an overview of the likely effect of lockdown on participants’ time, for example, in the reduction of commuting and the increase in home working and home-schooling children, both of which may have impacted on time th...
This chapter surveys the literature on the relationship between pandemics, literature (especially the role played by genre and popular fiction), and reading habits. Drawing on previous studies, we first examine how world pandemics and public health emergencies involving widespread illness have had significant literary and cultural impacts. We speci...
Applied Corpus Linguistics
Special Issue on Corpus Linguistics and the Language of COVID-19: Applications and Outcomes; Guest Edited by David Oakey, Benet Vincent
Communication has played a critical role during the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and communicators have had a particularly difficult task in persuading different types of a...
While the role Corpus linguistics (CL) in language teaching and learning continues to evolve, its use in the language teaching industry remains somewhat unclear. The specific ways in which ELT publishers use CL research to inform materials development are under-studied, meaning that it is not known whether CL is being used by publishers to its full...
Covert audio recordings feature in the criminal justice system in a variety of guises, either on their own or accompanied by video. If legally obtained, such recordings can provide important forensic evidence. However, the quality of these potentially valuable evidential recordings is often very poor and their content indistinct, to the extent that...
Many education professionals in Britain believe that school pupils have difficulty accessing academic texts because of inadequate knowledge of vocabulary. Previous research has suggested that some high frequency words used in non-specialised contexts have academic meanings that can cause problems for school pupils. We take corpus techniques used in...
Studies in modality comprise a complex canon of functional, formal, sociological, and diachronic analyses of language. The current understanding of how English language speakers use modality is unclear; while some research argues that core modal auxiliaries are in decline, they are reported as increasing elsewhere. A lack of contemporary and repres...
This article focuses on how register considerations informed and guided the design of the spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). It discusses why the compilers of the corpus sought to gather recordings from just one broad spoken register – ‘informal conversation’ – and how this and other design decisions afforded con...
Corpus linguistics involves the use of computer software to aid the analysis of language data, in some cases up to billions of words of text. Techniques like frequency lists, keyword lists, collocates, and concordancing can be used to identify linguistic patterns that humans might otherwise overlook. This chapter demonstrates how corpus methods hav...
Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three maj...
This unique volume brings together various academic voices and critical reflections on discursive manifestations of hate and radicalism in contemporary public discourses. The authors venture into an array of socio-political contexts and public spaces, providing a compelling overview of similarities and divergences, continuities and discontinuities,...
This chapter uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the oppos...
This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the opposit...
This article analyses reaction to the ideologically inspired murder of a soldier, Lee Rigby, in central London by two converts to Islam, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo. The focus of the analysis is upon the contrast between how the event was reacted to by the UK National Press and on social media. To explore this contrast, we undertook a c...