Michaela Mahlberg

Date: March 4, 2022

Time: 16:30

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BIO

Michaela Mahlberg is Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Corpus Research at the University of Birmingham. She is the editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins) and co-editor of the Corpus and Discourse series (Bloomsbury). As a corpus linguist, she is interested in language as a social phenomenon and the way in which we use language to understand and shape the world we live in. Michaela’s research focuses on the interface of language and literature. She is specifically interested in speech and body language in Victorian fiction, textual cohesion, discourse analysis and literary translation. Michaela was the principal investigator on the AHRC-funded CLiC Dickens project and has been leading the development of the CLiC web app. One of the projects she is currently working is GLARE (‘Exploring Gender in Children’s Literature from a Cognitive Corpus Stylistics Perspective’). Michaela Mahlberg is part of the Birmingham Plastics Network, an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 academics working together to shape the fate and sustainable future of plastics. This unique team brings together chemists, environmental scientists, philosophers, linguists, economists, artists, writers, lawyers and experts in many other fields, to holistically address the global plastics problem.

Further information:

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/elal/mahlberg-michaela.aspx

Digital humanities and the corpus linguistic study of fiction

There is increasing interest in the corpus linguistic study of fictional texts - sometimes referred to under the umbrella term ‘corpus stylistics’ (Semino and Short 2004, McIntyre and Walker 2019). At the same time, the computer-assisted study of fiction is a core area of the digital humanities more widely. In this session, I will look at corpus approaches that aim to account for properties of literary texts. I will present a number of examples to illustrate fundamental corpus methods, as well as key functionalities of the web application CLiC (Mahlberg et al. 2020). CLiC has been specifically designed for the corpus linguistic study of narrative fiction. The case studies will look at textual patterns that contribute to the creation of fictional worlds and the characters therein. The examples will be drawn from the CLiC corpora. The CLiC corpora contain 154 texts and over 16 million words across five subcorpora: the corpus of Dickens’s Novels, the 19^th Century Reference Corpus (19C), the Corpus of 19^th Century Children’s Literature (ChiLit), the Corpus of Additional Requested Texts (ArTs), and the African American Writers corpus (AAW). For all CLiC texts, direct speech and specific places around speech have been marked up (Mahlberg et al. 2021). Hence, CLiC can run searches across defined textual subsets and support the analysis of features of narrative fiction. An important question is how a range of features and patterns in fiction can be brought together in a coherent theoretical framework. My suggestions towards such a framework raise some fundamental questions about how far corpus linguistics can change our theoretical perspective on fiction and connects with broader concerns in the digital humanities.

References

Mahlberg, M., Stockwell, P., Wiegand, V. and Lentin, J. 2020. CLiC 2.1. Corpus

Linguistics in Context. https://clic.bham.ac.uk/

Mahlberg, M., Wiegand, V. and Lentin, J. 2021. The CLiC Tagger

https://mahlberg-lab.github.io/clictagger/

McIntyre, D. & Walker, B. 2019. Corpus Stylistics: A Practical Introduction. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.

Semino, E., & Short, M. 2004. Corpus Stylistics. Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge.

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