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ACORN (Aston Corpus Network)

The ACORN project was initiated in 2005 (with funding of £35,000 from the Flexible Learning Development Centre) to provide Aston University with corpora (collections of texts) in English, French, German, and Spanish, and parallel texts for Translation Studies.

The Director of ACORN is Ramesh Krishnamurthy.

The website was launched in 2007, and access to the corpora made available to all Aston staff and students using their Aston-id and password. Google Analytics says we receive up to 200 visits per month (October 2010: 153 visits from 24 countries).The ACORN usage monitoring programme logs over 4,000 corpus interrogations per month.

ACORN organises regular corpus events, the Aston Corpus Symposium (2007, 2008, 2009), the Aston Corpus Conference for Postgraduate Researchers (2008, 2009), and the Aston Corpus Summer School (2009, 2010).

ACORN research activities include:(a) the first Corpus Linguistics PhD student to obtain an Aston bursary and an AHRC doctoral award. Dr Iztok Kosem's thesis on Designing a Model for a Corpus-Driven Dictionary of Academic English was passed in August 2010. Iztok took up a post in Ljubljana in April 2010 as Director of the Institute of Applied Slovene, a primary partner in the ‘Communication in Slovene’ project, funded jointly by the European Union, the European Social Fund, and the Ministry of Education and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. (b) the GeWiss (Spoken Academic Discourse) project (c) the Discourse of Climate Change project

ACORN publications include

  • R.Grundmann & R.Krishnamurthy (2010) The Discourse of Climate Change: A Corpus based approach. CADAAD Journal 4/2: 125-146.
  • P.Larrivée & R.Krishnamurthy (2009) La créativité et la conventionnalité de groupes nominaux atypiques déterminative + pronom indéfini et leurs contextes communicatifs, in Actes de Represéntations du sens linguistique IV, Helsinki: Modern Language Society
  • R. Krishnamurthy (2008) ‘Corpus-driven lexicography’, International Journal of Lexicography 21/3, 231-242
  • Kosem, I. (2008) ‘Dictionaries for University Students: A Real Deal or Merely a Marketing Ploy?, Euralex 2008 Proceedings
  • Kosem, I. (2008) ‘User-friendly corpus tools for language teaching and learning’, TALC 2008 Proceedings
  • R. Krishnamurthy & I. Kosem (2007) ‘Issues in creating a corpus for EAP pedagogy and research’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6/4, 356-373
  • I. Kosem & R. Krishnamurthy (2007) ‘A New Venture in Corpus-Based Lexicography: towards a Dictionary of Academic English’, in Corpus Linguistics 2007 Conference Proceedings
  • W. Teubert & R. Krishnamurthy (eds) (2007) Corpus Linguistics, (6 volumes) Critical Concepts in Linguistics, Routledge