CLAVIER 2009: Corpora and Language Variation in English Research, International Conference

Corpora – principled collections of data in electronic format – have emerged over the last decades as a powerful analytical tool both in applied and theoretical linguistics. They have turned out of particularly significant importance in studies on language variation and language varieties. Indeed, the wealth and amount of data made available through corpus compilation and query tools have increasingly enabled researchers to explore differences across spoken and written discourse, social, diachronic and geographic varieties, age groups, gender, idiolects, etc. The widening of studies on language variation and language varieties, however, still calls for discussion on significant methodological issues, which pose, among others, the following questions: What are the major methodological problems in the research field? What is the role of the comparative perspective? Which tools and methodology best suit research? The conference focuses on such issues in order to provide a better definition of the concepts under investigation and bring together significant and innovative contributions in what is now understood as a widely researched area, thus presenting new tools and perspectives to be investigated. This is also the main general objective of the CLAVIER research group (Corpus and Language Variation Research Group), a research centre recently founded by the Universities of Bergamo, Firenze, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Roma “La Sapienza”, and Siena, and currently based in Modena. The point of departure is the invaluable contribution of two complementary strands of linguistic investigation - corpus analysis and discourse analysis – to research on language variation in English, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. One of the purposes of the 2009 CLAVIER conference is to reinforce national and international cooperation with scholars and research centres that can widen and complement the interest in language variation currently driving research at the centre. Plenaries by Udo Fries (University of Zürich), Anna Mauranen (University of Helsinki), Josef Schmied (University of Chemnitz), Geoffrey Williams (University of Bretagne-Sud). The conference brought together different perspectives on language variation and use. Plenaries and papers gave a special insight into the following topics: a. using historical corpora to investigate diachronic language variation; b. using corpora as an innovative tool in exploring geographic varieties; c. corpus linguistics in the investigation of non-native language use in professional settings; d. corpus linguistics tools, special languages, and specialist lexicography.