Dear friends and colleagues,

 

Since we all moved to the digital for the purpose of teaching I thought we may actually try and understand this as an opportunity rather than incarceration. As many of you know I have gained some skills in the realm of corpus research, which I am currently teaching to some students in a seminar of mine. The seminar is actually divided into three parts (1) what is corpus linguistics and how can you be a generativist and still to corpus research? 2) How to actually use a corpus – achieving stuff with Sketchengine 3) Finding a phenomenon to investigate) and we are now moving towards the second part, the hands-on part of the seminar, wo which I would like to invite you, your stundents and people that you know that might be interested in this topic: Here students learn how to use Sketchengine and its myriads of options. This part itself consists of three sessions and focusses of course on investigating grammar-related phenomena. However, Sketchengine can of course also be used to conduct other types of research, e.g. socio-linguistic research, sociology, politicology etc. Following these three sessions will allow partisipants to get familiar with the basic functionalities and enable them to compose querries allowing them to find what they are looking for. I have not planned on covering the built-in evaluation tools, however if there is demand I can do so at in an extra session.

If you want to join the course you need to have \do the following things: 

  1. Access to Sketchengine: There are multiple ways this can be achieved. The easiest for most of us is probably to simply acquire access via one’s university. In case your university doesn’t have access yet you can easily make this happen since Sketchengine receives founding from the EU thus entitling every European university to get access for free  (cf. https://www.sketchengine.eu/elexis/ ) the process is easy and quick. If this is not an option you can use the free trial for the moment.
  2. A PC with a browser and at least some speakers to listen to my explanations.
  3. You need to register to the newsletter on Cecilia Poletto's Website so I can mail you the Zoom link. Also please participate in the respective poll so we can determine the course-lanuage and I can adjust the slides (if needed). 

I am looking forward to seeing you in class,

Nicolas