Linguistics and modern languages research

Speech science laboratory

We are in the process of equipping a speech science laboratory with ultrasound capability and speaker comparison software to support forensic phonetic work.

Corpora and software for corpus linguistic analysis

We have a wide range of linguistic corpora including, but not limited to, the following:

  • British National Corpus (100 million words of written and spoken British English)
  • Brown Corpus of 1960s American English
  • LOB (Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen) Corpus of 1960s British English
  • FLOB (Freiburg-LOB) Corpus of 1990s British English
  • Frown (Freiburg-Brown) Corpus of 1990s British English
  • Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English
  • Australian Corpus of English
  • Corpus of London Teenage Language
  • Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic Part (including Old, Middle and Early Modern English)
  • Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots
  • Corpus of Early English Correspondence

In addition, we have numerous specially-constructed and annotated corpora compiled in the department, including the Early Modern English Discourse Presentation Corpus, the Early Modern English Modality Corpus and the HUM (Huddersfield-Utrecht-Middelburg) Corpus of fiction.

We also have a range of licensed software available for corpus linguistic analysis. Currently this includes the following:

  • Wmatrix
  • WordSmith Tools
  • Sketch Engine

Language learning facilities

Our Modern Languages Centre comprises two specialist PC labs with Sanako language-learning software and digital satellite TV, providing access to stations worldwide. The Centre is also well-stocked with dictionaries, magazines and newspapers, reference books and audio-visual aids in a multitude of languages. 

Software development

In addition to the above resources, we are also working with colleagues in the School of Computing and Engineering on the development of software for stylistic analysis utilising Text World Theory. Worldbuilder is a tool for annotating and visualising text worlds in discourse. We are currently finalising a prototype.