Susan Elizabeth Hunston OBE [1] (born 1953) is a British linguist. She received her PhD in English under the supervision of Michael Hoey at the University of Birmingham in 1989. [2] She does research in the areas of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics. She is one of the primary developers of the Pattern Grammar model of linguistic analysis, [3] which is a way of describing the syntactic environments of individual words, based on studying their occurrences in large sets of authentic examples, i.e. language corpora. The Pattern Grammar model was developed as part of the COBUILD project, where Hunston worked for several years as a senior grammarian for the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary . [4]
Having earlier taught at Mindanao State University in the Philippines, at the National University of Singapore, and at the University of Surrey, [5] Hunston is currently a Professor of English Language in the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has served as the Head of the School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. [6] In addition to research and teaching, she is a co-editor, along with Carol A. Chapell, of the Cambridge Applied Linguistics book series. [7]
Hunston is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. [8] She served as the Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics from 2006 to 2009. [9] She serves on the executive board [10] of the International Association of Applied Linguistics, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that has formal consultative relations with UNESCO ("the 'intellectual' agency of the United Nations") [11] and which is devoted to supporting applied linguistics in developing countries. [12] She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to higher education and applied linguistics. [13] [14]
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference.
Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to conscious attention when ambiguity impairs clarity of communication, given the pervasive polysemy in natural language. In computational linguistics, it is an open problem that affects other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, and inference.
A monolingual learner's dictionary (MLD) is designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. MLDs are based on the premise that language-learners should progress from a bilingual dictionary to a monolingual one as they become more proficient in their target language, but that general-purpose dictionaries are inappropriate for their needs. Dictionaries for learners include information on grammar, usage, common errors, collocation, and pragmatics, which is largely missing from standard dictionaries, because native speakers tend to know these aspects of language intuitively. And while the definitions in standard dictionaries are often written in difficult language, those in an MLD use a simple and accessible defining vocabulary.
COBUILD, an acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, is a British research facility set up at the University of Birmingham in 1980 and funded by Collins publishers.
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.
The Bank of English is a representative subset of the 4.5 billion words COBUILD corpus, a collection of English texts. These are mainly British in origin, but content from North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other Commonwealth countries is also being included.
John McHardy Sinclair was a Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching.
In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empirical data.
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
Patrick Hanks is an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He has edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names.
Data-driven learning (DDL) is an approach to foreign language learning. Whereas most language learning is guided by teachers and textbooks, data-driven learning treats language as data and students as researchers undertaking guided discovery tasks. Underpinning this pedagogical approach is the data - information - knowledge paradigm. It is informed by a pattern-based approach to grammar and vocabulary, and a lexicogrammatical approach to language in general. Thus the basic task in DDL is to identify patterns at all levels of language. From their findings, foreign language students can see how an aspect of language is typically used, which in turn informs how they can use it in their own speaking and writing. Learning how to frame language questions and use the resources to obtain data and interpret it is fundamental to learner autonomy. When students arrive at their own conclusions through such procedures, they use their higher order thinking skills and are creating knowledge.
Corpus-assisted discourse studies is related historically and methodologically to the discipline of corpus linguistics. The principal endeavor of corpus-assisted discourse studies is the investigation, and comparison of features of particular discourse types, integrating into the analysis the techniques and tools developed within corpus linguistics. These include the compilation of specialised corpora and analyses of word and word-cluster frequency lists, comparative keyword lists and, above all, concordances.
Michael Hoey was a British linguist and Baines Professor of English Language. He lectured in applied linguistics in over 40 countries.
Pattern Grammar is a model for describing the syntactic environments of individual lexical items, derived from studying their occurrences in authentic linguistic corpora. It was developed by Hunston, Francis, and Manning as part of the COBUILD project. It is a highly informal account that suggests a linear view of grammar.
The International Association of Applied Linguistics, or AILA, was formed in 1964 as an association of various national organizations for applied linguistics. AILA has more than 8,000 members in more than 35 different applied linguistics associations around the world. AILA continues to grow, working with existing and emerging regional networks, such as AILA East Asia, AILA Europe, AILA Arabia, and AILA Latin America. Its most high-profile activity is the World Congress of Applied Linguistics, which takes place once every three years. It also has two publications, AILA News, a newsletter, and the AILA Review, an academic journal.
In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), appraisal refers to the ways that writers or speakers express approval or disapproval for things, people, behaviour or ideas. Language users build relationships with their interlocutors by expressing such positions. In other approaches in linguistics, alternative terms such as evaluation or stance are preferred.
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) is a descriptive grammar of English written by Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan, first published by Longman in 1999. It is an authoritative description of modern English, a successor to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (ComGEL) published in 1985 and a predecessor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGEL) published in 2002. The authors and some reviewers consider it a complement rather than a replacement of the former since it follows – with few exceptions – the grammatical framework and concepts from ComGEL, which is also corroborated by the fact that one of LGSWE's authors, Geoffrey Leech, is also a co-author of ComGEL.
Alison Mackey is a linguist who specializes in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and research methodology. She is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on applied linguistics and research methods.
Monika Bednarek is a German-born Australian linguist. She is Professor in linguistics at the University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Corpus Lab. She is one of the co-developers of Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), which is a framework for analyzing how events are constructed as newsworthy through language and images. Her work ranges across various linguistic sub-disciplines, including corpus linguistics, media linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, stylistics, and applied linguistics.