Over the past 45 years linguists at Lancaster
have been pioneering a new approach to the
study of language, corpus linguistics. What
is corpus linguistics? Well, simply put, it's
the use of computers to analyse large collections
of real examples of language in use. Now our
work refocuses the study of language on what's
actually written or said, rather than what
experts think people can or should say. Now
we can do this because computers enable us
to analyse millions, nowadays billions, of
words, of evidence to account for the changing
patterns of use in written and spoken language
in everyday communication. Our studies began
with English, but of course we've studied
many languages, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Polish
to name just a few. We've done that because
Lancaster realises that language permeates
the human experience. At times it actually
lies at the root of important social problems.
So understanding how language works can often
be an important first step to addressing those
issues. Lancaster corpus linguists have helped
us on a huge range of valuable real-world
applications from vastly improved dictionaries
to speech-recognition software. But most importantly,
they've also influenced policy towards important
issues in society such as online grooming,
hate speech, at the way we discuss end-of-life
care. We've worked to understand language
at Lancaster for four generations now and
I look forward very much to what future generations
find out.
