The Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick held its 11th Postgraduate Conference on Wednesday, 18th June 2008.

Michael Hoey and Matthew Brook O’Donnell presented a revised version of their paper applying the findings of the Textual Priming Project to the analysis and teaching of paragraphing in text.

PowerPoint slides are available:

Death to topic sentences!

Michael Hoey and Matthew Brook O’Donnell presented a paper called ‘It was announced yesterday’ at IATEFL 2008 on April 10, 2008.

The paper focused on the pedagogical implications of the notion of textual colligation and reported on findings from the AHRC Textual Priming Project. The aim of the project is to carry out an extensive exploration of textual colligation in a corpus of newspaper articles.

PowerPoint slides are available:

it was announced yesterday_IATEFL2008

Video of the presentation has been posted on YouTube:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

Results of initial work exploring the notion of ‘concgrams’ in reference to the study of text-initial items in a newspaper corpus were presented at the AACL2008 (American Association for Corpus Linguistics) conference, held at BYU, Utah, April 13-15, 2008.

Download a PDF version of the presentation: Exploring Text-initial Concgrams in a Newspaper Corpus

The fourth Corpus Linguistics conference was held at the University of Birmingham from July 27 to 30.

There was a presentation of work from the Textual Priming Project:

Michael Hoey, Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Michaela Mahlberg & Mike Scott - ‘Exploring the textual positions and functions of lexical items in hard news stories’

•  PowerPoint presentation

The 19th European SFL Conference and Workshop was held at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, 23rd - 25th July 2007.

Michaela Mahlberg gave a presentation of work from the Textual Priming Project:

Michaela Mahlberg and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, ‘Functions of lexis in hard news stories: Methods, theory and interpretation’

• PowerPoint Presentation

The 28th ICAME Conference was held in Stratford-Upon-Avon between May 23 and 27, 2007.

There was a presentation of work from the Textual Priming Project:

Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Michael Hoey, Mike Scott, Michaela Mahlberg - ‘‘Where did you say that?’ The positional features of words as a characteristic of meaning’

• PowerPoint presentation

The Aston Corpus Symposium was held on Friday May 4th 2007 at Aston University, Birmingham.

 There were two presentations reporting work from the Textual Priming Project:

1. Michael Hoey (and Matt O’Donnell) - ‘The beginning of something important..?’
   • PowerPoint presentation
   • Audio recording of presentation linked to slides
2. Mike Scott - ‘Homing in on the text-initial cluster’
   • PowerPoint presentation
   • Audio recording of presentation linked to slides

PALC (Practical Applications in Language and Computers) 2007 was held at the Łódź University Conference Centre,  Łódź University, Poland from 19 to 22 April 2007.

 There were two presentations from the Textual Priming Project:

1. Michael Hoey - ‘The Beginning of something important?: Corpus evidence on the text beginnings of hard news stories’
   • PowerPoint presentation
2. Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Mike Scott, Michaela Mahlberg and Michael Hoey - ‘”When the text counts” Exploring the Implications of ‘text’ as unit in corpus linguistics’
   • PowerPoint presentation

Conference: “Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface” International Conference, 5-7 October 2006, University of Hanover, Germany
http://http://www.elegi-2006.com/

Michael’s presentation “Corpus-driven approaches to grammar: A search for common ground” reviews 3 corpus-driven positions:

1. Sinclair’s Idiom and Open Choice principles
2. Hunston & Francis’ Pattern Grammar
3. His own Lexical Priming

A fourth position, that of Stefanowitsch and Gries (Collostructions) could not be covered in the alloted time (even with 219 slides!!).

• PowerPoint version of presentation:  Hoey ELeGI2006 Presentation - Corpus-driven Approaches to Grammar
• PDF version of presentation: Hoey ELeGI2006 Presentation - Corpus-driven Approaches to Grammar