ROGER

Andreea Dinca attended SECL II 2018 – School on Experimental and Corpus Linguistics, held at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Thessaloniki, Greece, between 25 and 29 September 2018. SECL II was a three-day compact course on Experimental and Corpus Linguistics. The participation at this autumn school aimed at gaining more knowledge in the field of Corpus Linguistics through the lectures and lab practice offered by SECL II.

More information about the Autumn School

Impressions:

The well-organized three-day course provided the participants with a lot of interesting ideas for potential research in the fields of Experimental and Corpus Linguistics. The school’s workshops touched upon a wide variety of topics such as Language Acquisition, the Study of Narrative, Anaphora Resolution, Corpus Linguistics and Experimental Linguistics. A particularly interesting talk was given by Leah Roberts from the University of York: The researcher investigated real-time grammatical processing in Greek and English using the Eye-Tracking method. (Using Eye-Tracking to Investigate topics in L2 Acquisition and Processing) (link to article).

A considerable part of the school’s programme was dedicated to Corpus Linguistics. The lectures and lab practice provided the participants with a good introduction to Corpus Linguistics and to the tools used for processing corpora. The participants were first given a useful lecture on Corpus Linguistics and on corpus compiling. The lecture was followed by lab sessions where the speakers introduced the participants to a series of tools, like various R programme packages and XML. These tools are considered to be some of the most appropriate languages for encoding and manipulating data in the field of Corpus Linguistics. I found this hands-on approach very useful, because it gave the participants the chance to work and learn guided by the professors from the Aristotle University. Moreover, the professors and the entire staff of SECL II were open and ready to help and make useful suggestions for the participants’ ongoing research.