Abstract

This presentation will examine a corpus of UK broadsheet text centred around the term austerity. The corpus comprises over 21,000 articles (23m words) from the Independent, Telegraph, Guardian and Times newspapers. The aims are twofold: first to consider problems which arise in building a and parsing a corpus based on online text obtained from a database source such as LexisNexis, and second, to contemplate lexical patternings which have been found in the data. Findings will cover grammar, collocation and key words and key word clusters both synchronically and diachronically.

Mike Scott’s original career was in EFL and EAP , teaching in chiefly Brazil and Mexico, and then as a lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Liverpool University. His PhD (Lancaster University, 1990) was on Lexical Inferencing. His most recent post was as Reader in Corpus Linguistics, Aston University. He is the author of several corpus linguistic software packages of which the best known is WordSmith Tools (version 1.0 OUP 1996 and now at version 7.0). He is a Visiting Researcher at Aston University.