BLS Lecture Series: Approaches to Language

This new lecture series explores the various motivations and approaches to the linguistic study of language that researchers from different disciplines have. It comprises 10 lectures given by linguists from different disciplines and short workshops on their specific ways to investigate language.

Time and Location

Tuesdays, 6pm
in Room 327, New Arts Building, Main Arts.

Timetable for Semester One

16. October	Dr. Marco Tamburelli, School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University LINGUISTICS AS A SCIENCE Scientific investigation aims at developing principled explanations of the natural world. An important part in the development of these explanations is that they be based on observations. These observations must be systematic, objective, and replicable, and must be analysed according to certain principles. One of these principles, possibly the most central in the “hard sciences”, is that of theoretical modelling. Theoretical models must also be developed according to certain characteristics: they must be rigorously defined and must make testable predictions. Nevertheless, the focus of linguistic research – especially within bilingualism and language acquisition studies – has had a strong bias towards experimental studies (also known as “empirical” studies), with little reference to theoretical modelling. In this talk I will question whether experimental studies in themselves constitute “a science”, or whether something might be amiss. anslation). At the end, I will describe and demo the Text Mining Toolkit (TMT) software that I have been developing over the last decade.
30. October	Dr. Thora Tenbrink, School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University What your language reveals about your mind Cognitive Discourse Analysis is a method that can be used to gain insights about people's ways of thinking by looking closely at the language they use. For instance, language can reveal various ways in which scenes or events are perceived, and also how people conceptualise and solve problems. In my talk, I will first outline the general scope and features of this method as well as its prerequisites and limitations, and then showcase some results from my own research, focusing on spatial perception and wayfinding problems. In the workshop, empirical data collected in my studies will be used to demonstrate a small range of different analysis perspectives. Slides can be found here
10. November	READING WEEK
27. November	Dr. Christopher Shank, , School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University TBC
11. December	Dr. Peredur Davies, School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University AS REAL AS IT GETS: ANALYSING LINGUISTICS SPEECH CORPORA In this talk I will discuss a number of corpora (sg. corpus) of recorded and transcribed conversations between bilinguals that have been collected by researchers at Bangor University in the past few years. I will be discussing the benefits and issues involved with collecting such corpora, before going on to present research I (and others) have undertaken using data from such corpora, specifically with relation to Welsh and the speech of Welsh-English bilinguals. There will then be a workshop session on how to access and use the Siarad corpus of Welsh-English bilinguals’ speech.