Free workshop and symposium, hosted and funded by the Sydney Corpus Lab
2-3 July 2020
University of Sydney, Australia

Symposium details

Invited speakers

• Pre-symposium workshop plenary: Amanda Potts, Cardiff University, UK
• Opening plenary: Ute Römer, Georgia State University, Atlanta, US
• Closing plenary: Michele Zappavigna, University of New South Wales, Australia

Pre-symposium workshop: 2 July

A half-day, hands-on practical workshop on the web-based corpus analysis system CQPweb will be held on the day before the symposium, starting after lunch to enable participants to travel to Sydney. CQPweb provides a user-friendly interface to a diverse collection of corpora. In the workshop, Dr Amanda Potts will explain basic and advanced functionalities of the system. Participants will gain experience in working with written and spoken corpora, and will feel confident in applying a range of tools in their own research. Places in the workshop will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. Lunch will not be provided on this day.

Symposium: 3 July

At a time when more and more data is available digitally or can be transformed into digital data, the importance of corpus linguistics is increasing across linguistic subfields. The use of electronic/digital corpora is spreading, and many researchers now use a corpus linguistic approach to provide new insights into language or discourse. Corpus Linguistics Down Under builds on prior work in corpus linguistics in Australia (see e.g. A brief history of modern Australian English corpora), and aims to support and connect a growing number of researchers in the field. The symposium will bring together corpus researchers in Australia and beyond, with the aim of providing a platform for sharing research, for networking, and for building and promoting research capacity in corpus linguistics. The symposium will therefore not have any parallel strands but rather allow everyone to engage with each others’ research and encourage discussion and feedback.

Abstract submissions

We invite submissions for 20-minute research papers that use corpus linguistics to study language or discourse, including but not limited to areas such as corpus-based discourse analysis, corpus stylistics, corpus pragmatics, corpus-based sociolinguistics, corpus-based applied linguistics, corpus-based linguistic typology, World Englishes, etc. We welcome research papers discussing research findings from corpus linguistic projects or methodological and technical issues related to corpus design, building and analysis. Demonstration of software tools or other corpus linguistic resources are also welcome, provided they incorporate methodological innovation. Contributions can focus on results from completed as well as ongoing research, with an emphasis on novel approaches, methods, ideas, and perspectives. Work on any language is welcome. We invite submissions from established researchers and from early career researchers, including PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers.

Submission guidelines

• The language of the conference and conference abstracts is English.
• All abstracts should be submitted using the online submission system. Submissions should be in the form of abstracts only.
• Abstracts can be up to 300 words, including figures and references. They should be in 12pt or larger type, with margins of at least 2 cm on all four sides, and should include a title.
• Please submit your abstract in .pdf format (or a plain text file). If you have any trouble converting your file into .pdf please contact the local conference organiser at the address below. (On the Easychair submission system, if you upload your abstract as a .pdf file, please simply type 'abstract attached' in the abstract box.)
• Only one submission per author will be accepted. All abstracts will be reviewed by at least two referees. At this stage we do not envisage publishing any symposium proceedings.

Timeline

• Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2020
• Notification of acceptance: 28 February 2020
• Conference: 2-3 July 2020

Local conference organisers

• Georgia Carr (Project manager, Sydney Corpus Lab; email: info@sydneycorpuslab.com)
• Monika Bednarek (Director, Sydney Corpus Lab)

If you have queries about abstract submission or have problems using the EasyChair submission system, please contact Georgia Carr outside the upcoming holiday period (not online between 20 Dec and 7 January).