Books

Reading Habits in the Covid Pandemic

An Applied Linguistic Perspective

By Abigail Boucher, Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison and Robbie Love (under contract)

Part of the Palgrave Pivot series.

This volume presents and analyses the results of the Lockdown Library Project survey that ran between July-August 2020. The survey, which had 860 responses, examined public reading habits during the first lockdown period (March-July 2020) and generated both numerical data and free text responses totalling a corpus of nearly 100,000 words. The book, which draws on the fields of genres studies, health humanities and applied linguistics, uses a mixed-methods approach to provide a unique insight into the ways in which the first Covid-19 lockdown affected public reading habits. 

Overcoming Challenges in Corpus Construction

The Spoken British National Corpus 2014

By Robbie Love (2020)

Part of the Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics series.

This volume offers a critical examination of the construction of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) and points the way forward toward a more informed understanding of corpus linguistic methodology more broadly. The book begins by situating the creation of this second corpus, a compilation of new, publicly-accessible Spoken British English from the 2010s, within the context of the first, created in 1994, talking through the need to balance backward capability and optimal practice for today’s users. Chapters subsequently use the Spoken BNC2014 as a focal point around which to discuss the various considerations taken into account in corpus construction, including design, data collection, transcription, and annotation. The volume concludes by reflecting on the successes and limitations of the project, as well as the broader utility of the corpus in linguistic research, both in current examples and future possibilities. This exciting new contribution to the literature on linguistic methodology is a valuable resource for students and researchers in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, and English language teaching.

Check it out on the Routledge website!

See reviews by Jiawei Wang for the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (2020) and Siqi Liu for Natural Language Engineering (2021).

Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech

Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken BNC2014

Edited by Vaclav Brezina, Robbie Love and Karin Aijmer (2018)

Part of the Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics series.

Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three major areas of corpus-based sociolinguistics, while the remaining chapters feature rigorous analysis of the research outcomes of the project grounded in Spoken BNC2014 data samples, highlighting English used in everyday situations in the UK, with brief summaries reflecting on the sociolinguistic implications of this research included at the end of each chapter. This unique and robust dataset allows this team of researchers the unique opportunity to focus on speaker characteristics such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status, to examine a range of sociolinguistic dimensions, including grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and to reflect on the major changes that have occurred in British society since the last corpus was compiled in the 1990s. This dynamic new contribution to the burgeoning field of corpus-based sociolinguistics is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, grammar, and British English.

Check it out on the Routledge website!

See review by Huayong Li for Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2019).