Federica Formato
I am a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Brighton. I work on sexist language, representation of female politicians in the media and in Intimate partner violence.
Twitter:@genderedform
Location Brighton, United Kingdom
Activity
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Yes. Spanish in my opinion is doing a bit better (even if the RAE is against double forms). Italy has grass root initiatives but the majority of the people is not on board.
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Yes, there is work on german too! at some point a female professor suggested, fairly, that if there are more women in a group the feminine form should be used (replacing the common use of masculine form for gender mixed groups). it's a revolution and we are only at the beginning!
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Thank you Karen,I am going to read it now! Your work (and that presented in this mooc) is all super fascinating. Thank you for sharing it.
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Federica Formato made a comment
Fantastic interview! it shows how difficult it is to organize events that welcome different experiences but also how important this is! Wonderful job!
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Federica Formato made a comment
time to plan a visit to this library!
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Federica Formato made a comment
some years ago, a newspaper article in italy labelled three sportswomen (who won an archery competition) "chubby". they apologised after many people reported as inappropriate their headline. It always go back to the standard of beauty and the inability to think that non-standard beauties are unlikely to win (and if they do, then this is the newsworthy bit!)....
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only for the length of the Olympic games or after that too? they might be postponed i heard..
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that's terrible, i agree. whatever the beauty standards are it is clear that gender stereotyping are included!
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Hi Karen, sure. I will send it to you during the weekend so I feel less guilty about emailing research during the strike.
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Federica Formato replied to Federica Formato
you are absolutely right. I have seen more and more, it's really disgusting that these sorts of explanations still find room in courthouses and in the media. Unfortunately they form part of how some people see the world and it is more common than we think. It's really important that we fight these messages wherever they occur.
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Federica Formato made a comment
I have recently read two articles narrating women killing their husbands. They were very balanced in just writing the facts that could be known. There was no mention of jealousy as a motive, no blaming of the victim. Very interesting seen that it is almost impossible in italy to find headlines or newspaper articles that are not blaming the victim, showing a...
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What country were you thinking of? we have one in italy (called manifesto di venezia). in my opinion, the italian one would need more bad practices explained as it seems to be rather general.
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Federica Formato made a comment
Fantastic work! good luck and I will follow your work.
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Federica Formato made a comment
Another horrible one is when they talk about crime for passion, where they construct passion and love as part of a crime that has to do primarily with men's entitlement to control.
Another systematical pattern when discussing violence against women from a general point of view, is the lack of naming the perpetrator - men. Violence against women is..,...
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Federica Formato replied to Tixiana Toledo
and it's also awful that recommendation to how the media should narrate violence against women are constantly avoided.
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Federica Formato made a comment
Another fantastic video! thank you!
I would also recommend this article: https://journal.equinoxpub.com/GL/article/view/11931
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How interesting, thank you for sharing this research and what a beautiful idea to present students' projects.
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Thank you! will look at them now!
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This is such an important point, media are actively shaping how society perceives violence against women and somewhat suggests to the reader what is "normal"(ised). The other day I was pressuring a journalist to listen to why an article that appeared in "his" newspaper had the wrong headline. Headline was a direct quote from the killer (who killed his wife)...
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Federica Formato replied to Mick Reardon
@SophieDuncan-Shepherd absolutely. I was planning to add that (the binarism of my comment) and then forgot. Thanks for adding it i think it's important to remind us of that
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Federica Formato replied to Mick Reardon
Sure, i was talking about trends. I work on gender and in class most of the students are women, i go to gender conference and most of them are women. This is not to say that ALL men don't participate, this is to say that very often women participate more because of their experience in the world.
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Spain has an interesting scenario: on the one side the feminist government elected in 2018 that pushed for gendered language (for the government they asked to have ministras y ministros) and on the other the RAE that is not really on board with feminization or neutralisation. And clearly the right wing party is trying to push back all efforts for a feminist...
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Federica Formato made a comment
Thanks for the Kaye reference, will ask the library to buy it.
Shaw and Cameron is a seminal book - highly recommended
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Federica Formato made a comment
Here it is my take on Italian female politicians and gendered language: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327447705_Women_in_the_Public_Sphere_Gendered_Language
Italian politics is "peculiar" in relation to the sexualisation of women (in relation to berlusconi but not only).
The questions posed here are very important, i always double-check when i...
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Federica Formato made a comment
Thank you for this resource. I know of someone who just finished a phd thesis on gender and language on female politicians in Scotland. Will ask her if she is happy for me to share her details/links to her work.
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Federica Formato replied to Mick Reardon
The problem is that not many men engage with gender studies because gender is mainly seen as synonym of women. What interest would the dominant group who does not suffer discrimination have in (re)thinking about their privileged position? This is awful, i agree but the problem is not women being those interested, the problem is that men are not accompanying us...
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Federica Formato made a comment
There are the Bafta tonight here in the UK, we can report on it from tonight/tomorrow.
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Federica Formato made a comment
The comment I hate the most when one raises awareness on the imbalance of women (with respect to men, and possibly in intersectional terms too) is: it does not matter if it's a woman or a man, as long as they are capable. This comment is frequently made only when it's about women trying to find space in male-inhabited spaces. It is really infuriating. While...
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Federica Formato made a comment
apologies for advertising my work here, but if somebody is interested in how language is used or rather misused to represent female politicians in italian media this is my paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312301794_Linguistic_markers_of_sexism_in_the_Italian_media_A_case_study_of_ministra_and_ministro.
This and the other videos are raising...
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Federica Formato made a comment
I live in the UK and have been living here for 10 years. But I am a researcher of gender and/in Italian (in politics and media) therefore I looked at the data from my homeland. I wish I had known about this before as this info could have ended up in my book! Oh well, in the meantime I learned that (confirming my suspicions):
- 20% of women are represented...
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This was very very interesting. a couple of days ago there have been elections in Italy and the commentators in news programmes where basically all men (1 women out of 6/7 men per average). Some of us tweeted about this but it's so eradicated that only a few of us thought it was wrong. it's disgraceful!
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Some corpora have a restriction in place and they cannot be accessed. if you have signed up to this http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014/signup.php and it does not work, I will need to ask why it's not working. One last question: have you used an institutional email (e.g. your university one?).
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Hi Anmar, just to double-check: have you signed up to access the BNC2014 (i.e. step 2 in this unit: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/corpus-linguistics/6/steps/370811)
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Hi Anmar, how come you cannot access BNC2014? Have you asked for help to one of us already?
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Thank you Dogus for picking up Weijia's comment!
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Great! Some mentors will be available for 2 weeks after the end of the mooc (this Sunday, sadly!)
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Confidence interval is a statistical term - it indicates, briefly speaking, how "true" what is found can be in relation to a sample population.
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I think it is effective, my only "concern" would be about isolating words from contexts/styles.
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Just to double-check, have you gone through step 2 (Get access to the Spoken BNC2014)?
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@MohammadAlenezi thanks for clarifying! It seems a consistent way of collecting data.
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To do that, I always siggest to consult Paul Baker's book on CL and DA. It's such an amazing resource as it is a step by step guide. It was published in 2006
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Great!
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How interesting! My take on this is that not only it depends on what language they are learning but also from what language they start (in other words, the source language). I think there is a lot there that can tell us about what mistakes L2 make.
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Hi Senerath! How interesting. My only concern is the bias/assumption that L1 students in UK are correct in using their grammars. I think one would need to select even from native speakers. Academic language is something that everybody struggles with because it does not depend on the first language (only) but on the familiarity with the genre!
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I read that newspaper article too, how interesting! (http://theconversation.com/why-native-english-speakers-fail-to-be-understood-in-english-and-lose-out-in-global-business-54436, for those who want to read it). I think it's because there is a misunderstanding about language and specific languageS.
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Can I ask what you mean by background (level of students, native speakers)?
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That's a good dream. Last year Future Learn offered a cloud with all the terms that were mostly used in the mooc(s). I do not seem to have seen it this year but let me give it another look! I think that is a bit what you would be studying if..
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Federica Formato made a comment
Thank you all for your comments on your DREAM corpus! We look forward to reading them all and corpusdreaming with you!
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Hi Sue Annan, I think one should distinguish between collocation of standard language and collocation of non-standard variety in a sociolinguistic fashion. It is true that some collocates can be regionally specific, but I think we enter the realm of varieties of the language and, ultimately, the register, the context, the extra-linguistic context. I think...
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I think the first thing to consider is the type of error (grammatical or collocation) and then choose a corpus that has been tagged with a specific code for errors. I still think though that the students should be guided to see the mistakes (e.g. in a corpus) rather than telling them to find mistakes in a corpus. Ultimately, students' motivation has to do the...
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Fantastic! :)
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Table comes up I guess because it's only one "?" which is one letter only, have you tried ??*able or ?+able?
As for walk, try and change the option to "simple query (case sensitive)". it should work!
let us know -
I agree BUT.. i think sociolinguists are very careful with the term "correctly" as they are very much aware that language belongs to the speakers who decide how to use it and to what extent it becomes standard
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Federica Formato replied to Tamara Rudenko
yay! we are happy that they are easy to follow!
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Hi, have you followed all the steps? The first one is to sign up to CQP web, the second one to register on the BNC2014 website (http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014/signup.php). Only after you have followed these two steps you can access the BNC2014. Let me know if it works
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Yes, and more specifically with social factors which could correlate with language patterns.
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You're welcome!
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Fantastic Jennifer! Paul is a fantastic academic! He has worked on research that was either corpus-based or corpus-driven, as it very much depends on what your goals are.
And your research sounds very interesting!
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Wow Olena, this seems a very comprehensive investigation into the BNC! well done!
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Absolutely (coming from Italy, I know what you mean). I hope that the #metoo time can help to raise awareness on what seems normal(ized).
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Federica Formato made a comment
Thank you all for your valuable comments on this video! This is such a timely and needed research. You can have a look at the events of the Research group at Lancs Uni for forensic linguistic research:
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This is a great wishful thinking! I am slightly more negative about this, I think politics, politicians and the whole society has to do much much more to tackle this issue. it's appalling how much hate speech there is around these days.
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Thank you Tamara for sharing this comment. It helps to reflect on how people see linguists (and forensic ones in this case) and the misconceptions around this.
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It's tiring isn't it - the constant threatening culture (online and offline) for women.
We're glad you liked this interview. -
Federica Formato replied to Mohammad Alenezi
You can certainly sort in Lancsbox (by clicking on left or right) in the grey box and you can sort the results based on how you display the text. In other words, if you display with POS then it will sort these, if not it will sort the plain text.
As for nation, I am sorry nothing comes to my mind at the moment. Maybe another mentor...
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Federica Formato replied to Qiaoli Li
That's super good news!
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Federica Formato replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
Oh and how did I forget this:
https://benjamins.com/catalog/jls.7.2
It should have come to mind straightaway!
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Yes, I think that one should build a corpus that can specifically explore LGTBQIA+ identities. General corpora might not be the best for this. It also, as explained above, if we want to focus on production or representation.
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Absolutely! And the field, although super grateful to Robin Lakoff who is its forerunner, has moved away from simplistically looking at gender from top-down. I explain above a rationale for still investigating groups of women and men (in a non existentialist way). But really we moved to q bottom up approach.
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Hi :) can you tell us a bit more about your research?
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Federica Formato replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
great!
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I agree this is a good point. I think that some books are targeted at younger audiences but it very much depends.
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And some others have so many of them :p (italian has 6 for "the")
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Federica Formato replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
Hi, I did a search on google scholar to start with: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=language+used+by+non-binary+people&btnG=. I think this could help. A student of mine wrote the dissertation on conversations between binary and non-binary people, here it is a post about it:...
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You're welcome
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Federica Formato replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
I am happy to provide more info and reference if you are interested in a specific topic as there is a lot of interesting and fascinating research. This is what comes at the top of my mind:
- women who kill (Amanda Potts)
- gender, class and mumsnet (Jai Mackenzie)
- transgender identities (Lucy Jones)
- violence against women (Susan Elrich)Maybe you...
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Federica Formato replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
Representation study mainly focus on how the media construct gender (but some other texts have been looked at). I looked at how heterosexual relations and men killing women are constructed in the Italian media but other studies looked at masculinities and femininities. In my lecture yesterday, I explained the notion of "intersectionality" which is based on the...
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Federica Formato replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
Hi Ca! Do you mean work done not on the gender of the speakers?
I will try and provide a comprehensive answer on research done on gender. As I tell my students there are two main angles through which gender and language (and sexuality) are studied:
1. production - men/women or people on the gender spectrum constructing gender through language (as in this... -
Federica Formato replied to Rebecca Van Herck
Oh yes, i did not think of it. i was trying to think what it could go with! I went to check on the BNC and as an adjective it appears 22 times (diamond shaped, diamond impregnated, etc). Well spotted!
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Thanks for noticing it. I made a note of the typo and we'll have it fixed.
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If you upgrade you should be able to access the contents for a much longer time (in fact there will be no expiring date). If your future learn suggests 17 December then that must be the date (this is controlled by the platform, we do not really have a say). Another option, in case you do not get funding, is to download the videos, the transcripts, the...
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Federica Formato replied to Rebecca Van Herck
thanks Rebecca, could you give us an example
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Federica Formato made a comment
You could also get more info about the BNC2014 here: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014/documentation.php
And you can also see it mentioned in the media!
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Federica Formato made a comment
BNCLab is such an interesting tool! I cannot wait to show it to my students of Regional Englishes! Let us know if you plan to integrate it in your teaching activities.
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Federica Formato made a comment
This video is super interesting! As a socio-corpus linguist, I have really enjoyed Miriam's account of the interaction between these fields.
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Hi Maryna, I am wondering whether you could check if you have java installed and to help you we would need to know your operating system.
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Fantastic!
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Federica Formato replied to J S
Maybe, you could run a corpus-based analysis (e.g. looking for the Gaelic words as those ones in the link you sent). Maybe you could do a diachronic study and see if the use of those has increased or decreased..
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Hi @BobJones you can use pdf with lancsbox too! In fact these are all the formats that Lancsbox recognizes:.txt, .xml, .doc, .docx, .pdf, .odt, .xls, .xlsx. I tried to open a file with Word16, and I can see "plain text" in the menu "save as" (I assumed it was standard for all Word16). No big deal, you can use any from the list given above! I hope this helps
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@TaylorB. No worries! I am sure you'll do great!
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Federica Formato replied to Liyu Yang
There is a lot done on stylistics and corpus linguistics. Have a look at the profiles of Prof Malhberg: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/elal/mahlberg-michaela.aspx Prof Semino (there is an "in conversation with" video in Week 2): http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about-us/people/Elena-Semino
They are just two out of amazing scholars who work...
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Keep us posted and fingers crossed!
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Absolutely, @HenryObisesan . I think this holds true in each country nor I think newspaper hide these from the readers. Politics plays a key role in the media.
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Thank you @DogusOksuz for helping Tamara so quickly!
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Hi Dave. Yes NVivo helps with qualitative analysis while LancsBox with quantitative. Depending on how you want to look for linguistic patterns, one or the other can be used, or why not use both? Triangulation can help to strengthen the argument.
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Yes, Linda is right - watch out the duplications (which can be easily done with Nexis as there is a box to tick, and also you can select if you are only interested in articles above 500 words or newswires)! You do not need to have a file for each article, you can have sub-corpora depending on your research question.
I like to give examples so that hopefully... -
Federica Formato replied to Hongyan Zhang
Hi! You will have to load either a corpus already available or your own corpus (clicking on "load data" or "download"). In unit 1.15, there is a step-to-step video that can be of help: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/corpus-linguistics/6/steps/370727
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Federica Formato replied to J S
Interesting question, can I ask what is the period you want to look at? Also what documents could you investigate? My only reservation is how do you use CL to isolate the Gaelic words? Are you planning to annotate it according to the language?
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Federica Formato replied to Qiao Wang
It actually can! Which documents are you planning to investigate? what is the research question? You might want to look at: Bhatia, V. K., Langton, N. M., & Lung, J. (2004). Legal discourse: Opportunities and threats for corpus linguistics. Discourse in the professions: Perspectives from corpus linguistics, 16, 203-231.
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Hi Tamara. I do not have a Mac so I might not be able to help (but I am going to email Dogus and see if he can help as he owns a mac!). I will give it a go for the second question (UTF-8), when you select "save as", there should be an encoding menu on the bottom-right part, isn't there?.
To convert a number of pdfs into texts, I would recommend:...
