Tag: CorpusLinguistics

Jun
1
2026

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At the 47th ICAME conference in Koblenz (26–30 May 2026), themed A Confluence of Corpus Research in the Age of AI, two early-career researchers took home the event’s top prizes — one analysing rap, the other media speech.

Best Poster — Stig Johansson Bursary: Xingni Li (University of Oxford) compared speech prosody and rap flows in American English and Cantonese, showing that the languages’ clear rhythmic differences in ordinary speech largely vanish in rap — and that Cantonese rap appears to move toward the conventions of American English rap.

Best Paper — John Sinclair Bursary: Cheryl Yeo (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) used a corpus of media speech to study rhoticity — the variable “r” — in Singapore English, finding it present but uneven across ethnic groups, and shifting toward non-rhotic when speakers adopt a more local orientation.

Both bursaries, named after pioneers of corpus linguistics, carry a cash prize. Warmest congratulations to both winners — richly deserved.

Jun
1
2026

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The final day at ICAME47 brought things full circle. Saturday morning kicked off with four parallel sessions spanning work in progress and full papers – from recent changes of taboo words like ‘bloody hell’ to the pressing question of whether language creativity will diminish in the age of AI-generated news content.

Questions like these set the perfect stage for our final plenary. Natalia Levshina took us on a collective reflection: what actually is AI? Should we use it for corpus annotation, and if so, at what cost? Her take? It’s LLMs we’re working with, not AI – and while they can be a powerful ally in corpus annotation, they always come at a cost. She closed with a set of best practices to help navigate that tradeoff. The audience was quick to extend the conversation, showing that this is a debate far from over.

We finally wrapped up with the Annual General Meeting and closing ceremony, welcoming three new members to the ICAME board and re-electing Patricia Ronan as Chair. 🎉 Congrats!

And then it was just us – the team. Grateful for everything learned, everyone met, and every moment that made ICAME47 what it was. 💙 Thanks to everyone who made this happen and joined the flow!

May
30
2026

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We wrapped up our plenary sessions with an impactful final talk by Dr. Natalia Levshina (Radboud University, The Netherlands.) titled “Linguistic Annotation of Corpora in the age of AI.”

​Dr. Levshina explored the evolution of AI terminology before diving into the critical, often hidden costs of modern models—including data privacy risks, financial burdens, and high carbon emissions. To counter these challenges, she proposed a set of best practices for researchers. Notably, she advocated for utilizing local, smaller, and open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) for linguistic tasks, offering a more sustainable, energy-conscious alternative to massive commercial infrastructure.

​Thank you to Dr. Levshina for closing our plenary series with such a vital call for responsible, mindful innovation!

May
29
2026

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Our third plenary was nothing short of a journey – and Jane Stuart-Smith made that quite literal. She opened with a deceptively simple question: does our research actually represent the terrain we are moving on?

From there, she took us on the road. Her project on Scottish English draws on data flowing from partners across the US and UK, with a team that drives the research — sometimes in a camper van, sometimes in a Land Rover, whatever the terrain demands. 🚐 And the terrain? Think Isle of Skye. Think Old Man of Storr. Rugged, breathtaking, and absolutely worth navigating carefully.

That metaphor carried her core message: the maps we use in research must truly represent the landscape we are exploring. In Stuart-Smith’s case, that landscape is the sociophonology of Scottish English — how vowel duration, r-realisation, and other features shift and evolve across region, class, age, and gender.

The morning then opened up into four parallel panels covering a wonderful range of topics — from metaphor to corpus software. The confluentes of ideas just keep flowing! 🌊

May
28
2026

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Among the many highlights of ICAME47 has been the presence of researchers from the University of Oxford, bringing with them the distinctive perspective of one of the world’s most storied institutions. Martin Wynne (Oxford Text Archive) contributed both a workshop and a poster, marking a particularly special moment: the Oxford Text Archive celebrates its own 50th anniversary in 2026. His talks traced fifty years of curating digital language resources — from the early days of the Oxford Concordance Programme and the launch of the Text Encoding Initiative, through the construction of the British National Corpus, to today’s repository of more than 70,000 items — while looking ahead to the opportunities and challenges that AI brings for trusted, authentic language data.
Equally fascinating was Xingni Li‘s poster on speech prosody and rap flows in American English and Cantonese — a cross-linguistic study examining how the rhythmic and tonal features of two very different languages shape their respective rap traditions, and how Cantonese rap appears to be drifting toward the conventions of American English rap. A refreshingly novel topic for a corpus linguistics conference, and a reminder of just how far the field’s methods can travel.
It has been wonderful to have Oxford represented so richly at ICAME47, and we thank Martin and Xingni for their thoughtful contributions.

May
28
2026

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A special moment unfolded today as Prof. Dr. Patricia Ronan (TU Dortmund) [Chair of the ICAME Executive Board], led a brief celebration of the 50th issue of the ICAME Journal. The journal was first launched in March 1978 as ICAME News — a newsletter edited by Stig Johansson at the University of Oslo. Half a century on, the journal remains a leading international outlet for research in English corpus linguistics, and it was wonderful to pause and recognise this milestone together. Here’s to the next fifty!

May
28
2026

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On the first official conference day, our social programme kicked off with a stable car ride over the Rhine before a short walk to the coupling room, which rewarded us with a breathtaking view over the Confluence of Rhine and Moselle — the very confluentes that give this year’s conference its name. Good flow continued into the evening with sparkling wine, delicious finger food, and great music. 🥂🎶

May
27
2026

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After a full day of pre-conference workshops yesterday, our welcoming session opened with words from University President Prof. Dr. Wehner and Faculty 2 Dean Prof. Dr. Neuhaus, before JProf. Andreas Weilinghoff got things officially flowing 🌊

We then dove straight into the deep end with our first plenary talk by Laurence Anthony, exploring this year’s conference motto ‘Confluentes’ — where AI and corpus linguistics meet. While corpus linguistics and generative AI share deep roots, they diverge significantly in how they handle data, interaction, and transparency. Anthony made a compelling case for how integrating AI into established corpus tools like AntConc (which he developed) can bridge that gap, opening new possibilities for multimodal analysis while keeping transparency and validity in focus.

Day 1 is off to a great start – more to come!