Maria Wiktorsson: From Idiomaticity to On-Line Data

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Maria Wiktorsson, Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at K3. The title of her talk is:

From idiomaticity to on-line data

 It will be held at Wednesday, February 21 at 10.15-12.00 room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

I will (very) briefly introduce the field(s) of linguistics and then move over to relate my own research interests to some areas of linguistic research. The aims of the seminar presentation are 1) to introduce myself and my research interests 2) link these interests to theoretical, methodological and applied perspectives of linguistics. The second aim, as I see it, cannot be done without offering at least a cursory overview of the very broad field of the study that can be encompassed under the general heading of linguistics.

While the discipline is very much at the heart of humanities in its main study object being the underpinnings of human communication, the field actually stretches much wider than that, and is in many of its sub-fields inherently cross-disciplinary. At the social science end of the scale of linguistic study, sociolinguistics combines, among other research traditions, social constructivist and ethnographic research traditions with linguistic theories and methods to study language in social contexts. At the natural science end of the spectrum, the fields of neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics draws on theories and methods from neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, experimental psychology, etc. to understand how language operates at the neural and cognitive level. Under the heading of applied linguistics, real-world issues relating to language are dealt with – from language learning, language pedagogy, and translation to language policy and discourse analysis. I’ll attempt to plot my own path through this immense field by introducing some of my projects and research interests.

I will also conclude the presentation by discussing some current work; a methodological issue relating to the validity of using blog data to investigate current trends in language. Blog data is generally perceived as a less norm-exposed genre of language, commonly but perhaps erroneously termed ‘spoken in nature’. I have started investigating these assumptions about blog data using the method of corpus linguistics, and I will discuss some aspects of this work.

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