Influence of English is fading, says EU chief Juncker

By Crispian Balmer | FLORENCE, ITALY European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker took a swipe at Britain on Friday, saying he would not give a speech in English because the language was becoming less significant following Brexit. “Slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe,” Juncker told a conference in Florence before switching into French and drawing applause from his audience of EU officials, local leaders and Italian students. Juncker, who hails from Luxembourg, speaks several European languages fluently and regularly uses English at international gatherings. He said he also…

Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics, 5-7/07, London, UK

The Survey of English Usage at University College London (UCL) will be running a three-day Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics from 5-7 July 2017. This Summer School is an introductory course in corpus linguistics for students of linguistics and the English language which is designed to be accessible and inspiring! You will be taught at UCL in the heart of Central London by researchers based in the Survey of English Usage. Places are limited. Be sure to book early. Students are expected to have a basic knowledge of concepts…

[Resource] Corpus ‘Australia 2015/2016’

The corpus ‘Australia 2015/2016’ includes all articles from major Australian newspapers published from August 2015 to July 2016 that include the key term ‘Australia’ or ‘Australian(s)’ in the title. Altogether, the corpus contains over 7 million tokens in almost 13,000 articles from 18 newspapers. The corpus thus reflects one year of printed media coverage of topics directly relevant to Australia. Download Australia2015/2016 Corpus here Download word frequencies from this corpus here

Twelve incredibly British phrases the rest of the world doesn’t understand

Twelve incredibly British phrases the rest of the world doesn’t understand Posted 16 days ago by Narjas Zatat in offbeat Americans have always had a bizarre fixation with the Queen (a remnant of the empire George Washington couldn’t scrub away?) and her birthday seems to be no different. The Queen is turning 90 this week, and it seems people abroad are more excited than many Britons themselves. But how well do people abroad actually understand Britain? Here are twelve phrases that’ll be utter gobbledygook to everyone else but the British: 1. Bob’s…

Part-time job ad: Intonation and/or Information Structure Annotators for Bulgarian and English

An EPSRC-funded project, investigating face-to-face dialogue from a cross-linguistic perspective, is looking for annotators for information structure and/or intonation for English and Bulgarian. The annotation will be performed in Praat. The data to be annotated consists of 1 hour recording of dialogue between 2 people (per language). Preferred skills: – Native level proficiency of Bulgarian or English – Prior training in the ToBI annotation system (pitch accents and prosodic phrase boundaries) – In-depth knowledge of different information structure phenomena – Experience using Praat – Minimum commitment of 10-20hrs/week for the…