University of Michigan Corpus Analysis Group

The University of Michigan Corpus Analysis Group is a group of researchers and graduate students from different disciplines who are interested in using corpus tools and methods in their research. Current members include faculty, staff and students from the English Language Institute and doctoral students from English, Education, Linguistics, Political Science, and Nursing. The meetings provide training in corpus software and analysis and opportunities to present work in progress.

If you are interested in joining the group, please get in touch with Ute Römer at

Next meeting

When? 22 March 2010, 4:00-5:30pm
Where? Fries room, English Language Institute
What? Presentation by Yvonne Ford on “What nurses talk about in hand-offs: Results from a corpus analysis”; work-in-progress report by Nick Ellis and Matt O’Donnell on “Towards an inventory of English Verb Argument Constructions, their type-token frequency distributions, semantic functions, and contingency mappings”

Previous meetings

• 22 February 2010: presentation by Matt O’Donnell and Ute Römer on “Analyzing the disciplinary and textual distribution of phraseological items in a new corpus of proficient student writing”
• 25 January 2010: work-in-progress report by ELI visiting scholar Yinjie Fang on “The use and usefulness of two corpora of Chinese L1 novice and expert academic writing” and presentation by Matt O’Donnell on “The Adjusted Frequency List”
• 14 December 2009: work-in-progress report by ELI visiting scholar Yingying (Ananda) Yang on “Form-meaning connections in SLA and their determinants: Evidence from Chinese learners’ acquisition of English simple past” and presentation by John Swales and Ute Römer on “Attended or unattended this? A new phraseological approach”
• 16 November 2009: presentation by ELI test developer Fabiana MacMillan on “Conceptual patterns in collocation” and hands-on introduction to BNCweb by Matt O’Donnell
• 12 October 2009: progress updates on the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) and its online distribution through a new search interface (by Ute Römer, Matt O’Donnell and members of the Michigan Corpus Linguistics team)
• 8 September 2009: presentations by visiting scholar Min Wang on “Syntactic priming in L2 production” and by visiting scholar Rafael Alejo on “Phrasal verbs in the writing of learners of different L1 backgrounds”
• 4 August 2009: presentations by visiting scholar Carmen Perez-Llantada on “A corpus-based study of interpersonal aspects of research writing” (applications of the Spanish-English Research Articles Corpus, SERAC) and by Ute Römer on “Establishing the phraseological profile of a text or text type” (CL 2009 re-run)
• 7 July 2009: presentation by John Swales on the “pleasures and perils of corpus linguistics”; presentation and demo by Clare Llewellyn and Michael Krot from JSTOR of “Data for Research” web application (http://dfr.jstor.org/)
• 9 June 2009: dry-run of CIRD5 presentation by John Swales and Moises Escudero (English and Education) on Spanish and English research article abstracts; hands-on activity (Ute Römer): phrase-frames in corpora of learner/apprentice writing
• 12 May 2009: Work-in-progress report by Laura Aull (English and Education) on “Genres and representation in American literature: An anthology corpus study”; presentation by Matt O’Donnell on lemmatization and collocation
• 20 April 2009: Work-in-progress report by Andrea Jones-Rooy (Political Science and Complex Systems) on “The case of energy in the discourse of the general US population and the US Government”; discussion of keyword methodology and diachronic sampling issues
• 16 March 2009: Work-in-progress report by Chris Palmer (English) on borrowed derivational suffixes in Medieval English; dry-run of AAAL 2009 presentation by Nick Ellis, Matt O’Donnell and Ute Römer on measuring formulaicity in language
• 13 February 2009: Work-in-progress report by Aaron Ohlrogge (ELI) on academic formulas in test-taker writing; discussion of issues in formulaic language research
• 16 January 2009: Work-in-progress report by Moises Escudero (English and Education) on split infinitives in English (update); presentation by Miranda Kozman on vague language in MICASE; information on conferences and publication outlets in corpus linguistics
• 2 December 2008: Work-in-progress report by Judy Dyer (ELI) and Tim Green (English and Education) on hedging in the Generation 1.5 Corpus; discussion of XML coding issues
• 4 November 2008: Work-in-progress report by Moises Escudero (English and Education) on split infinitives in English; presentation by Matt O’Donnell (ELI) on textual priming
• 23 September 2008: Work-in-progress report by visiting scholar Akiko Okamura on roles of you in MICASE lectures; Work-in-progress report by visiting scholar Holger Limberg on office hours at German and US universities
• 12 August 2008: Work-in-progress report by Laura Aull (English and Education) on a corpus analysis of American literature anthologies; Work-in-progress report by visiting scholar Merche Querol on explorations of the Q&A sessions from a Linguistics and a Chemistry conference
• 28 July 2008: Work-in-progress report by Yvonne Ford (Nursing) on a corpus analysis of handoffs; Work-in-progress report by Zak Lancaster on the use of corpus linguistics in writing instruction; Work-in-progress report by visiting scholar Diane Schmitt on the developmental features in a corpus of non-native speaker writing at a British university
• 14 July 2008: Hands-on introduction to kfNgram (Ute Römer); presentation by visiting scholar Merche Querol on online EAP materials for self-study (GRAPE project, Castellon, Spain)
• 23 June 2008: Hands-on introduction to BYU corpus of American English (Steffi Wulff); Work-in-progress report by Zak Lancaster on the language of evaluation in Korean L2 and American L1 writing
• 2 June 2008: Hands-on introduction to AntConc (Ute Römer); exploring a corpus of Jane Austen’s novels with AntConc
• 12 May 2008: Presentation by Ute Römer on basic issues in corpus linguistics, central steps in corpus analysis, and online corpora; discussion of corpus compilation issues led by Steffi Wulff
• 5 May 2008: University of Michigan Corpus Analysis Group inaugural meeting; introductions and expectations; discussion of reasons for working with corpora

Some UM Corpus Analysis Group members with ELI visiting scholars in July 2008
Left to right: Tim Green, Aaron Ohlrogge, Norbert Schmitt, Ute Römer, Merche Querol, John Swales, Laura Aull, Diane Schmitt, Yvonne Ford