(Im)politeness variation and corpus linguistics

This talk reports on an ongoing programme of work which applies corpus methods to the study of (im)politeness, an area of study within pragmatics. It begins by discussing some of the theoretical issues encountered when studying pragmatic phenomena via corpus methods, not least because of the latter’s reliance on linguistic form. It then proposes a new method for studying (im)politeness in large and diverse corpora: identifying specific formulae, examining their function in context via concordance analysis; and then using statistical methods to trace variation across groups and contexts. Drawing upon a series of case studies, the talk examines how (im)politeness varies across both Britain and the USA.

Student Activism in Modern Age

This presentation explores the student initiative Sa zobuď! as a case study of modern student activism. It highlights concrete data, real impacts, and the role of student engagement in developing skills that are valuable for future success in the labour market.

Capturing the melodicity of speech

Mentions of either a particularly melodic (“singsongy”) or particularly monotonous (“flat”) intonation style have featured prominently in descriptions of e.g. regional dialects or non-native speech. The idea of a characteristic speech melody has also been an important component of reports on autistic communication, dating back to the first descriptions in the 1940s.  In attempting to gain a clearer understanding of intonation style in autism, we have shown that previous findings are contradictory, and that existing tools for measuring intonation style are inadequate. We developed a new method for semi-automatically capturing pitch range (“spaciousness”) and pitch dynamics (“wiggliness”) in order to quantify the melodicity of speech. After initial application to speech in autism, the method has been used to analyse a wide range of phenomena, such as diachronic changes in the prosody of Italian TV news, intonational correlates of children’s oral reading proficiency, and acoustic signatures of multilingualism in rural Kenyan schools. I will give an overview of relevant research and a demonstration of the experimental method, with reference to an open-access tutorial.