Thursday, 26th September, 14.00-15.00

Carita Paradis

Carita Paradis from the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden, is interested in the dynamics of meaning making in human communication and couches her research within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Central to this approach is the meaningful functioning of language in all its guises and all its uses in discourse. She uses different empirical methods – corpus methods as well as experimental techniques of different kind to contribute to a better understanding of what linguistic expressions reveal about human interaction, perception and cognition and inversely how they influence and give rise to patterns and structures in natural language use.

More information: http://www.sol.lu.se/en/person/CaritaParadis/

This talk reports on the compilation of the London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC-2)—a corpus of contemporary spoken British English, collected 2014–2019. The design of the corpus is the same as the world's first corpus of spoken language, namely LLC-1, with spoken data mainly from the 60s. In addition to the fact that we have a corpus of contemporary speech (dialogue as well as monologue), the existence of LLC-2 also gives researchers the opportunity to make principled diachronic comparisons of speech over the past 50 years. Not only does the new corpus allow us to detect change with respect to language use, but also with respect to how speakers behave in real communication. This is of crucial importance for the study of language itself, for the study of meaning-making and discursive practices, and as a basis for psycholinguistic research, where a corpus of spoken language, and in particular impromptu everyday conversation, is a window into the mental processes of speaking (production) and listening (comprehension). An important novelty offered by LLC-2 is that the transcriptions of the recordings are time-aligned with the sound files, which, for instance, makes it possible to measure prosody and dialogue management between speakers with great precision. The benefits of spoken corpora in general and of LLC in particular will be demonstrated through examples of case studies in the talk.

The compilation of LLC-2 has been made possible through a generous grant from Linnaeus Centre for Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication, and Learning at Lund University, financed by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 349-2007-8695) and the Erik Philip-Sörensens Stiftelse. LLC-2 will be made available at the Humanities Lab’s corpus server at Lund University during 2019. It will be fully equipped with metadata about the texts and the speakers, and a corpus manual.