Tony McEnery’s research while affiliated with Lancaster University and other places


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Publications (137)


Building LANA-CASE, a spoken corpus of American English conversation: Challenges and innovations in corpus compilation
  • Article
  • Full-text available

October 2024

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24 Reads

Research in Corpus Linguistics

Elizabeth Hanks

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Tony McEnery

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[...]

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Raffaella Bottini

The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of Spoken American English (LANA-CASE) is a collaborative project between Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University to create a publicly available, large-scale corpus of American English conversation. In this article, we describe the design of LANA-CASE in terms of the challenges that have arisen and how these have been addressed – including decisions related to operationalizing the domain, sampling the data, recruiting participants, and selecting instruments for data collection. In addressing these challenges, we were able to draw on and further develop strategies established in the creation of other spoken corpora (including the British English counterpart to LANA-CASE, the Spoken British National Corpus 2014) as well as to implement recent theoretical and technical innovations related to each step. We hope that this discussion can inform future projects focused on the design and construction of spoken corpora.

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Size of sub-corpora of three British Library Newspapers, 1 January 1979-22 April, 1880
Social actors collocating with disraeli and beaconsfield in two newspapers
Collocates central to the social practice of family membership in the three corpora
Family, politics and media: Gladstone during the Midlothian campaign, 1879–1880

August 2024

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8 Reads

Journal of Historical Pragmatics

In this paper, we utilise the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus to examine reporting surrounding William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, a key point in the democratization of British politics where a politician not only communicated with ordinary people through hustings but indirectly to a wider electorate via media reporting of those hustings. With the use of social actor analysis ( van Leeuwen 2008 ), approached through collocation, we find that a distinctive feature of media reporting was a focus on Gladstone’s family. This surprising intersection of family and electioneering reveals a powerful hierarchy of social relationships in terms of gender and seniority, which became an effective propaganda strategy as Gladstone, enabled by Liberal-supporting newspapers, utilised his family as a political tool.


Corpus linguistics and the social sciences

April 2024

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106 Reads

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1 Citation

Corpus Linguistics and Lingustic Theory

Corpus linguistics, with its methodological orientation towards the empirical analysis of language based on large text collections, has the potential to offer significant tools for addressing real-world problems across various social science domains, including climate change, criminology, healthcare and policy making. Despite this potential, the integration of corpus linguistics into social science disciplines (beyond linguistics) remains hampered by fundamental differences in epistemology, definitions and methodological approaches. This article explores the relationship between corpus linguistics and the social sciences. It is argued that epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, represents a primary barrier to integration, with much corpus linguistics research aligning with positivist and naturalist epistemologies. By contrast, many social science disciplines embrace more interpretive, conventionalist approaches that account for the dynamic nature of social phenomena. Considering the role of naturalism and conventionalism within both corpus linguistics and the social sciences, this article illustrates how these epistemological stances are likely to influence the acceptance and use of corpus methods in social science research. Despite the challenges, areas of convergence (e.g. shared use of data processing tools and the acknowledgement of the central role of language in social processes) provide opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. As means to bridge the epistemological divide, this article advocates for a critical realist approach and concludes by calling on users of corpus linguistic methods to be reflexive and transparent about their epistemological stances when reporting their research.



The Representation of Islamism in the UK Press

October 2023

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88 Reads

This chapter explores the language that newspapers published in the UK use to represent Islamism. The chapter studies 22 years of UK national press reporting on the topic. Working with a very large volume of data, we use the approach of corpus linguistics to allow us to be able to account for the use of words referring to Islamism. This is an advantage of the corpus approach that this chapter uses. It allows us to look at a far larger body of real-life language use (typically millions, and sometimes billions, of words) than is feasible using purely qualitative approaches. Using this approach, we look at the terms Islamism, Islamist(s) and political Islam. The results show a skewed representation of Islamism, and a failure, at times, to distinguish apart Islam and Islamism in the UK press. Accordingly, the chapter concludes with some comments on how reporting of Islam and Islamism could be improved.


British Linguistics

July 2023

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39 Reads

In Part 1, MacMahon describes the work of early British linguistics (e.g., the Oxford English Dictionary), and then discusses the development of phonetics, the role of Daniel Jones, his work on the phoneme, and his belief in ‘practical’ phonetics. After describing Alan Gardiner’s work, he focuses on John Rupert Firth, the dominant figure in the early 1930s to late 1950s, who taught mainly at SOAS in London. He developed ‘a contextual theory of meaning,’ based on Malinowski’s ideas, ‘prosodic phonology’ and the idea of several simultaneous systems (polysystematicity). After Firth’s death, Chomsky’s ideas about syntax became dominant, while the term ‘neo-Firthian’ was applied to Michael Halliday and Systemic Linguistics from the early 1960s. In Part 2, McEnery and Hardie survey neo-Firthian corpus(-driven) linguistics by John McHardy Sinclair and his group, their focus on ‘collocation’ (co-occurrence patterns of words in discourse), and their interest in ‘lexicogrammar.’ For them a corpus is central: theories and analytic generalizations and categories must emerge from corpus data. They impacted lexicography by setting up COBUILD to provide data, ideas, and analyses. Also important is the ‘Idiom Principle’: i.e., in language there are a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases, which has led to two different neo-Firthian theories of language.



Swearing, discourse and function in conversational British English

June 2023

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58 Reads

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3 Citations

Journal of Linguistics

In this paper we look at the role that macrostructures in discourse have to play in the study of swearing. While studied in isolation, such macrostructures have not yet been studied comprehensively and the range of macrostructures studied has been small. By contrast, work on microstructures is much better developed. In response to this, using spoken corpus data from the BNC2014, we take two approaches to studying discourse in this paper. In the first approach, we explore spoken data which has been annotated with a functional discourse coding scheme that shows, across the corpus, the distribution of a set of macrostructures, discourse units, that generally characterise conversation. Our goal is to see how swearing distributes according to discourse unit function and to account for any observations made. Following from that, we explore a single macrostructure of discourse-narrative, including its sub-elements-to see whether swearing interacts with this macrostructure and its component parts. We conclude by arguing that discourse is an important dimension along which the use of swearing may vary, that such variation is likely to relate to emotion, and that the different perspectives on macrostructure taken in the paper are complementary.




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Citations (79)


... Notably, CL methods are used in academic disciplines not strictly related to linguistics where language or the analyses of discourse(s) play a significant role, spanning an ever-growing range of disciplines that includes, among others, sociology (Rutbcova, 2015), sports studies (Brooke, 2020), journalism (Touri & Koteyko, 2015), media discourse (O'Halloran, 2010) and historical research (Tumbe, 2019). Though the impact of corpus linguistics in the wider social sciences can be impeded by a lack of epistemological alignment (McEnery & Brookes, 2024), these contributions to disciplinary knowledge generally highlight the affordances of using corpus methods in the fields mentioned above, usually by complementing the standard, disciplinary methods and adding some sort of powerful knowledge to the otherwise well-established epistemologies in these fields. ...

Reference:

Exploring epistemological disciplinary boundaries: corpus linguistics methodology and methods across the disciplines.
Corpus linguistics and the social sciences

Corpus Linguistics and Lingustic Theory

... More recently, McEnery et al. (2023) have extended the scope of corpus research on swearing above the level of the turn to explore how different discourse macrostructures interact with swearwords. Their results show that swearing in general, and F-words in particular, are more frequently found in emotionally charged sequences such as joking around, sharing feelings and opinions, and engaging in conflict (McEnery et al., 2023: 41). ...

Swearing, discourse and function in conversational British English
  • Citing Article
  • June 2023

Journal of Linguistics

... A precise definition of a collocation has been elusive in the L2 literature (Boers & Webb, 2018 for a concise review on the phraseology vs. corpus-based approaches to defining collocations). Following Baker, Hardie, and McEnery's (2006) definition in corpus linguistics, this study defines collocation as "the phenomenon surrounding the fact that certain words are more likely to occur in combination with other words in certain contexts" (p. 36). ...

Corpus-building for South Asian languages
  • Citing Chapter
  • August 2006

... Another major revolution in linguistics is the emergence of corpus linguistics. McEnery & Hardie (2013), maintained that with the aid of AI, scholars possess the capacity to amass, retain, and scrutinize extensive collections of linguistic data, spanning a wide range of mediums such as written literature, oral discourse, and even communication that incorporates multiple modes of expression. These vast and comprehensive datasets offer linguists with invaluable resources to explore and analyze linguistic phenomena across a wide range of languages, dialects, and historical periods. ...

The History of Corpus Linguistics
  • Citing Article
  • March 2013

... Machine learning algorithms can quickly sift through large datasets, identify patterns, and draw connections, making it easier for researchers to analyze vast amounts of academic literature. Mitkov (2019) emphasizes that AI tools are particularly useful in fields like corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, where analyzing large volumes of text is essential for understanding linguistic trends and structures. ...

The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics

... Epistemological frameworks shape how scholars within a field interpret evidence and construct knowledge. Although there is room for alternative interpretations, corpus linguistics can be conceptualised as a critical realist approach to social science (McEnery & Brezina, 2022) that embraces an empirical epistemology (Teubert, 2005) and studies the statistical properties of language (Stefanowitsch, 2020) through a variety of forms of analysis (McEnery & Hardie, 2012). Critical realism promotes epistemological relativism (Bhaskar, 1975;Stutchbury, 2022), acknowledging that reality is mediated by (social) structures and understood through different research methods capable of generating knowledge. ...

Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics
  • Citing Book
  • September 2022

... Another of the most comprehensive analyses of this topic is provided by Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2013), whose approach represented a fusing together of one popular methodology (CDA) with another whose application in this area was, at that time, emerging (corpus linguistics). Since then, a growing body of work has utilised corpus linguistic techniques in order to examine media representations of Islam and Muslims, including in the context of the UK press (e.g., Clarke, McEnery & Brookes, 2021;Clarke, Brookes & McEnery, 2022;Baker & McEnery, 2018). ...

Keywords through time: Tracking changes in press discourses of Islam
  • Citing Article
  • August 2022

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics

... It is also important to mention the work done by Lancaster University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (e.g. El-Haj et al., 2015;McEnery et al., 2019), which significantly impacted the field. Zaghouani, (2017) presented a Critical survey discussing the freely available Arabic corpora, and more recently, Ahmed et al. (2022) founded 48 free and accessible Arabic corpora by searching the most popular information technology (IT) resources 1 . ...

1 Introducing Arabic Corpus Linguistics
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2019

... al., 2017). For Vietnamese and Arabic, research of specific grammatical elements as well as textbook information was used substantially (Thompson, 1987;Ngo, 2006;Shaqra, 2007;Pham & Kohnert, 2009;Lyovin et al., 2017;Nguyen & Dutta 2017;McEnery et al., 2019). To introduce the basic linguistic features of Haitian Creole, a holistic approach comparing it with French was used (Valdman, 1988;Coffman Crocker, 2009). ...

Arabic Corpus Linguistics
  • Citing Book
  • January 2019

... Yet limited direct measurements of precipitation and temperature exist in Britain before systematic observations began in 1862 and 1891 CE (78), respectively. Therefore, while we consider several moisture scenarios from the 1891-2015 CE gridded meteorological time series for temperature and precipitation in our analyses (Materials and methods), we argue that the first decade of observations (1891-1901 CE) offers the most reasonable proxy for the early industrial era (1770-1840 CE) due to similar solar (70,71), oceanic (64, 74), and regional volcanic forcing (72,73) conditions occurring before significant industrial warming (>0.5°C) (79)(80)(81)(82). When broadly wetter modern (1961-2015 CE) moisture conditions are applied rather than the comparatively dry early industrial conditions, waterpower potential is overpredicted on average by ∼12-13% (Fig. S2). ...

Representation of Drought Events in the United Kingdom: Contrasting 200 years of News Texts and Rainfall Records
Frontiers in Environmental Science