London Language

'Like or else!'

We're really pleased that our speaker in next week's Talk About Language session will be Mai Zaki from the American University of Sharjah. The title of her talk is:

'Like or Else!' The Pragmatics of Arabic Religious Posts on Facebook

Mai is a former Middlesex PhD student. She completed her PhD ('Relevance theory and reference: a corpus-based approach') in 2011.

Here is her abstract:

How are Arabic religious posts formulated on Facebook? Why are they formulated in that way? And how are they relevant to the audience? In this talk I will be discussing some of the features of Arabic religious posts on Facebook within the framework of pragmatics and Relevance Theory. Linguistic features, such as the use of conditionals, imperatives and negation, are all manipulated by the speaker to increase the “likeness” of such posts on Facebook. At the intersection between religion, language and cyber-media, Arabic religious posts on Facebook reflect an interesting way of communicating religious messages through pictures and text which seek to be relevant, and sometimes ‘too relevant’, to the audience.

All welcome.

The talk will take place from 1.30 to 3pm(ish) in room V103, Vine Building, from 1.30 to 3pm on Tuesday 3rd February.

Directions and campus map are available here: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/get-in-touch/directions-london

The full programme is at: http://billydug.typepad.com/londonlanguage/talk-about-language-2014-2015.html

Contact me with any queries and to ask for further information:

Billy Clark [email protected]

Online Resources for Grammar Teaching

We're really pleased that our speaker in next week's Talk About Language session (please note the different day, time and place for this one: Friday 23rd January, 1.30-3pm, VG07, Vine Building) will be Bas Aarts from University College London.

Bas is Director of the Survey of English Usage, one of the most important and well-established research centres focusing on corpora in linguistic research. He has edited and published lots of important work on language and linguistics, and held a number of key roles, including being Vice-President for the Profession for the International Society for the Linguistics of English. The Survey of English Usage has also been involved in a number of very successful impact-focused projects, including the development of apps which help with understanding key concepts in grammar and projects which help teachers and students working on grammar at school, most recently the 'Englicious' project which provides resources for work at primary school.

The title for Bas's talk is:

Online Resources for Grammar Teaching

And here's how he describes it:

In this talk I’ll be discussing how large language databases (corpora) can be used to explore the English language, such as its present-day structure and usage and how these developed over time. I will also look at how corpora can be used to teach grammar and other linguistic concepts in schools.

All welcome.

As mentioned above, the talk will take place at 1.30-3pm in room VG07, Vine Building, from 1.30 to 3pm on Friday 23rd January. Directions and campus map are available here:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/get-in-touch/directions-london

The full programme is at:

http://billydug.typepad.com/londonlanguage/talk-about-language-2014-2015.html

Contact me with any queries and to ask for further information:

Billy Clark [email protected]