Dawn Archer

Reader in Corpus Linguistics; Cluster Lead, UCLan Linguistics

School of Journalism, Media and Communication

Harrington Building 247

+44 (0)1772 893027

dearcher@uclan.ac.uk

Dawn Archer is a graduate of Lancaster University, where she earned her first degree in History and English Language, her MA in Stylistics, and her PhD in Linguistics. Her areas of expertise include pragmatics (modern and historical), corpus linguistics and the discursive practices of the (historical) English courtroom.  She also has a growing interest in the language of emotion (and the linguistic performance of emotion).

Biographical Notes / Qualifications

B.A. (Hons), MA, Ph.D (Lancaster)

Research

Dawn's primary research spans two (overlapping) fields:

Historical pragmatics/discourse analysis

A substantial part of Dawn's research relates to 'spoken' interaction as it appears in speech-based historical texts (approx 1600+). This work tends to be interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and pragmatics / critical linguistic approaches. An area that she has explored in some detail is the historical courtroom: in particular, she focuses on the interaction between use, user and context: that is to say, the different ‘uses’ that participants made of questions (and other eliciting devices) in the historical courtroom, and the extent to which their questions controlled/shaped (and/or were shaped by) the utterances of others. She is also interested in the linguistic/legal development of the historical courtroom over time and the internal/external pressures that occasioned changes to courtroom practices. To this end, she is currently developing a corpus of 18th-19th century English trial texts that represent not only examination sequences (between lawyers and witnesses) but also opening and closing speeches (as they began to appear), so that we can gain a better sense of the range of discursive practices used by/involving the main courtroom participants at this time (i.e. lawyers and witnesses and, to a lesser extent, judges and defendants: cf. Archer 2005 & Archer 2006a: see also Archer in prep). In more recent work, she has also explored face-work – especially verbal aggression - in the courtroom (modern and historical: see, e.g., Archer 2008a; Archer 2011a; Archer under review). This work, in particular, has captured the interest of legal scholars.

Dawn has extended the sociopragmatic annotation work outlined in her monograph (Archer 2005) by co-developing a scheme for identifying and annotating requests in historical texts (with Prof. Jonathan Culpeper, Lancaster University), which draws on the ideas of Blum-Kulka (1989) amongst others. This work has led to one paper to date (see Culpeper and Archer 2008).
Dawn is also working with computing colleagues (Dr. Paul Rayson and Alistair Baron, Lancaster University) to retrain the UCREL semantic annotation system - a tool that combines part-of-speech and semantic tagging - so that it automatically analyses historical texts from 1600. As part of this work, they have developed a Variant Detector (VARD), which identifies / matches variants to their “normalised” equivalents, using a number of computational processes. The team have been awarded one British Academy grant and are in the process of applying for further grant funding so that they can take this work further (see http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/VariantSpelling/). Developers at the Oxford English Dictionary have expressed an interest in the VARD, in particular.

Dawn, Paul and Alistair are currently using the VARD and DICER (a tool developed by Alistair) to trace English spelling variation over time and also across genres representative of different historical periods. In the coming 24-36 months, they plan to implement the VARD into an historical version of the semantic tagger, and map the existing semantic tagset used by the latter onto the categories within the Historical Thesaurus of English. This work will be undertaken in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Glasgow and Helsinki.

Dawn's work in regard to the use of verbal aggression in the courtroom (see especially Archer, under review) has led to a third area of research; the relationship between language and (the performance of) emotion. This new interest brings together linguistic and (behavioural) psychological approaches. It also provides Dawn with plentiful opportunities to work with colleagues across UCLAN as well as from other universities (national and international), and to work with agencies and commercial companies (including the Emotional Intelligence Academy). 

Current Research and Supervision

I am happy to supervise MAs/PhDs that: utilise corpus linguistics techniques;  engage with pragmatic theory/approaches (historical and modern);  focus upon the courtroom (modern and historical);  focus upon impoliteness.

Publications

Books

K. Aijmer, D. Archer & A. Wichmann (forthcoming 2011). Pragmatics: An Advanced Resource Book. Routledge.
D. Archer & P. Grundy (2011) Pragmatics Reader. Routledge.
D. Archer (2005) Historical Sociopragmatics: Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640-1760). Pragmatics and Beyond New Series. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.    

Edited collections

D. Archer (ed.) (2009) What’s in a word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction. Ashgate.
A. Wilson, P. Rayson & D. Archer (eds.) (2006) Corpus Linguistics around the world (Language and Computers series). Rodopi, Amsterdam.
D. Archer, P. Rayson, A. Wilson & T. McEnery (eds.) (2003) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. UCREL technical paper no. 16. UCREL, Lancaster University. ISBN 1 86220 131 5.

Guest edited journal / themed issue

D. Archer and J. Luchjenbroer (ed.) (2011) Facework and im/politeness across legal contexts.  Journal of Politeness Research. Language, behaviour, culture. 7(1). Mouton de Gruyter. Journal articles
D. Archer (under review) Cross-examining lawyers, facework and the adversarial courtroom. Submitted to the Journal of Pragmatics (March 2010).
D. Archer (2011a) Libelling Oscar Wilde: The Case of Regina vs. John Sholto Douglas. Journal of Politeness Research. 7(1): 73-99.
D. Archer (2011b) Facework and im/politeness across legal contexts: an introduction. Journal of Politeness Research. 7(1): 1-19.
D. McIntyre & D. Archer (2010) A corpus-based approach to mind style. Journal of Literary Semantics. 39(2): 167-182.
D. Archer & J. Culpeper (2009) Identifying key socio-pragmatic usage in plays and trial proceedings (1640-1760): An empirical approach via corpus annotation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 286-309
A. Baron, P. Rayson & D. Archer (2009) Word frequency and key word statistics in historical corpus linguistics. International Journal of English Studies 29(1): 41-68.
D. Archer (2008b) Digital Humanities 2006: When two became many (review) Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23,1.
T. Pilz, A. Ernst-Gerlach, S. Kempken, P. Rayson and D. Archer (2008) The identification of spelling variants in English and German historical texts: manual or automatic? Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23, 1, pp. 65-72.
D. Archer (2006a) (Re)initiating strategies: Judges and defendants in Early Modern English courtrooms. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7 (2): 181-211.
S. Piao, P. Rayson, D. Archer & T. McEnery (2005) Comparing and combining a semantic tagger and a statistical tool for MWE extraction. Computer Speech and Language (Special issue on Multiword expressions). Vol. 19 (4): 378 - 397, Elsevier.
M. Deegan, H. Short, D. Archer, P. Baker, T. McEnery & P. Rayson (2004) Computational Linguistics Meets Metadata, or the Automatic Extraction of Key Words from Full Text Content. RLG Diginews, Vol. 8, No. 2. ISSN 1093-5371.
M. Short & D. Archer (2003) Designing a world-wide web-based stylistics course and investigating its effectiveness. Style 37(1): 27-64.
D. Archer (2002) "Can innocent people be guilty?".A sociopragmatic analysis of examination transcripts from the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Journal of Historical Pragmatics. 3(1): 1-30.

Chapters in books [ = peer reviewed]

D. Archer (forthcoming 2011) Data retrieval in a diachronic context: the case of the historical English courtroom. In: T. Nevalainen and E.C. Traugott (eds.). Handbook on the History of English: Rethinking Approaches to the History of English. Submitted to Oxford University Press.
D. Archer (in press a) Tracing the crime narratives within the Palmer Trial (1856): From the lawyer’s opening speeches to the judge’s summing up. In: C. Heffer, F. Rock & J. Conley (eds.) Legal-Lay Communication: Textual Travels in the Legal Process. Oxford University Press.
D. Archer (in press b) Pragmatics and Discourse in the Early Modern English Period. In: Bergs, A. & L. Brinton (eds.) Historical Linguistics of English. Mouton de Gruyter (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HDK) series).
D. Archer (2011) Theory and Practice in Pragmatics. In D. Archer and P. Grundy (eds.). Pragmatics Reader. Routledge.
D. Archer (2010a) The Historical Perspective. A diachronic perspective on English Courtroom Practice. In: M. Coulthard and A. Johnson (eds.) A Handbook of Forensic Linguistics. Routledge, pp.185-198.
D. Archer (2010b) The History of Speech Acts. In: A.H. Jucker & I. Taavitsainen (eds.) Handbook of Historical Pragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp.379-418.
D. Archer & D. Bousfield (2010) “See better, Lear”? See Lear better! A corpus-based pragma-stylistic investigation of Shakespeare’s King Lear.  McIntyre, D. & B. Busse (eds.). Language and Style. Palgrave, pp.183-203.
J. Culpeper & D. Archer (2009) Is English spelling a problem? Can it easily be fixed? In: J. Culpeper, F. Katamba, P. Kerswill & R. Wodak (eds.) English Language and Linguistics. Palgrave, pp. 244-258.
D. Archer (2009a) Does Frequency Really Matter? In: D. Archer (ed.) What’s in a word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction. Ashgate, pp. 1-16.
D. Archer (2009b) Promoting the Wider Use of Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction Techniques. In D. Archer (ed.) What’s in a word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction. Ashgate, pp. 159-162.
D. Archer, J. Culpeper & P. Rayson (2009) Love – ‘a familiar of a devil’? An Exploration of Key Domains in Shakespeare’s Comedies and Tragedies. In D. Archer (ed.) What’s in a word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction. Ashgate, pp. 137-158.
D. Archer (2008a) Verbal aggression and impoliteness: related or synonymous? In Bousfield, D. & M. Locher (eds.) Impoliteness in language. Language, Power and Social Processes Series. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 181-207.
D. Archer, J. Culpeper & M. Davies (2008) Pragmatic annotation. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (eds.) Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 613-641.
J. Culpeper & D. Archer (2008) 'Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play-texts, 1640-1760'. In: A. H. Jucker & I. Taavitsainen (eds). Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 45-84.
P. Rayson, D. Archer, A. Baron & N. Smith (2008). Travelling Through Time with Corpus Annotation Software. In: B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.) Corpus Linguistics, Computer Tools, and Applications - State of the Art. PALC 2007. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 29-46.
D. Archer (2007a) Computer-Assisted Literary Stylistics: The State of the Field. In M. Lambrou & P. Stockwell (eds.) Contemporary Stylistics. Continuum, pp. 244-256.
D. Archer (2007b) Developing a more detailed picture of the Early Modern English courtroom: Data and methodological issues facing historical pragmatics. In S. M. Fitzmaurice & I. Taavitsainen (eds.) Methods in Historical Pragmatics. Recovering speaker meaning and reader inference. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 185-218.
D. Archer (2006b) Tracing the development of “advocacy” in two nineteenth century English trials. In M. Dossena & I. Taavitsainen (eds.) Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English. Bern: Peter Lang; Linguistic Insights series, pp.41-68.
D. Archer & J. Culpeper (2003) Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics. In A. Wilson, P. Rayson & T. McEnery (eds.) Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: Studies in honour of Geoffrey Leech. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 37-58. (Peer reviewed) papers published in conference proceedings
D. Archer, A. Kilpatrick and H. Day (2009) English Language Studies Initiative for Employability (ELSIE): The benefits of embedding employability into a subject curriculum. In Proceedings of European First Year Experience (EFYE) Conference. University of Wolverhampton, 8-9 May 2008, pp. 7-13.
A. Baron, P. Rayson and D. Archer (2009). Automatic Standardization of Spelling for Historical Text Mining. In Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2009, University of Maryland, USA, 22-25 June 2009.
P. Rayson and D. Archer (2008). Key domain analysis: mining text in the humanities and social sciences. In Proceedings of Workshop on Text Mining Applications in the Social Sciences in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on e-Social Science. 18 June 2008, Manchester, UK.
P. Rayson, D. Archer, A. Baron, J. Culpeper and N. Smith (2007a). Tagging the Bard: Evaluating the accuracy of a modern POS tagger on Early Modern English corpora. In M. Davies, P. Rayson, S. Hunston and P. Danielsson (eds.) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference: CL2007, University of Birmingham, UK, 27-30 July 2007.
P. Rayson, D. Archer, A. Baron and n. Smith (2007b). Tagging historical corpora - the problem of spelling variation. In Proceedings of Digital Historical Corpora, Dagstuhl-Seminar 06491, International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science, Schloss Dagstuhl, Wadern, Germany, December 3rd-8th 2006. ISSN 1862-4405.
D. Archer, A. Ernst-Gerlach, S. Kempken, T. Pilz, P. Rayson (2006). The identification of spelling variants in English and German historical texts: manual or automatic? In proceedings of Digital Humanities 2006. The Sorbonne, Centre Cultures Anglophones et Technologies de l'Information, Paris, France, July 5 - 9, 2006, pp. 3 - 5.
P. Rayson, D. Archer and N. Smith (2005). VARD versus Word: A comparison of the UCREL variant detector and modern spell checkers on English historical corpora. In proceedings of the Coprus Linguistics 2005 conference, July 14-17, Birmingham (UK). Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series on-line e-journal, Vol. 1, no. 1, ISSN 1747-9398.
S.L. Piao, D. Archer, O. Mudraya, P. Rayson, R. Garside, T. McEnery and A. Wilson (2005) A Large Semantic Lexicon for Corpus Annotation. In proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2005 conference, July 14-17, Birmingham (UK). Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series on-line e-journal, Vol. 1, no. 1, ISSN 1747-9398.
O. Mudraya, S.L. Piao, L. Löfberg, P. Rayson and D. Archer (2005). English-Russian-Finnish cross-language comparison of phrasal verb translation equivalents. In C. Cosme, C. Gouverneur, F. Meunier and M. Paquot (eds.), Proceedings of the Phraseology 2005 Conference, Lovain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 13-15 October 2005, pp. 277-281.
D. Archer, P. Rayson, S. Piao and T. McEnery (2004). Comparing the UCREL Semantic Annotation Scheme with Lexicographical Taxonomies. In Williams G. and Vessier S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX (European Association for Lexicography) International Congress (Euralex 2004), Lorient (France), 6-10 July 2004. Université de Bretagne Sud. Volume III, pp. 817-827.
 L. Löfberg L, J-P Juntunen, A. Nykanen, K. Varantola K, P. Rayson and D. Archer (2004). Using a semantic tagger as dictionary search tool. In Williams G. and Vessier S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX (European Association for Lexicography) International Congress (Euralex 2004), Lorient (France), 6-10 July 2004. Université de Bretagne Sud. Volume I, pp. 127-134.
P. Rayson, D. Archer, S.L. Piao and T. McEnery (2004) The UCREL Semantic Analysis System. Proceedings of the LREC-04 Workshop, Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic labelling for NLP tasks, Lisbon (Portugal), pp. 7-12.
S. Piao, P. Rayson, D. Archer and T. McEnery (2004) Evaluating lexical resources for a semantic tagger. LREC-04 Proceedings, Lisbon (Portugal), pp.499-502.
S. Piao, P. Rayson, D. Archer, A. Wilson and T. McEnery (2003) Extracting multiword expressions with a semantic tagger. In ACL-2003 Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Analysis, Acquisition and Treatment Workshop Proceedings, pp. 49-56
D. Archer, T. McEnery, P. Rayson and A. Hardie (2003) Developing an automated semantic analysis system for Early Modern English. In Archer, D., Rayson, P., Wilson, A. and T. McEnery (eds) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language: Lancaster University, pp. 22-31.
L. Löfberg, D. Archer, S. Piao, P. Rayson, T. McEnery, K. Varantola and JP Juntunen (2003) Porting an English semantic tagger to the Finnish language. In Archer, D., Rayson, P., Wilson, A. and T. McEnery (eds) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language: Lancaster University, pp. 457-464.

Teaching

Dawn is responsible for the following undergraduate modules:

• LG 2210 Computer-based Text Analysis
• LG 2238 Framing the News
• LG 3232 Power in Talk
• EG 3301 English Language & Literature
• LG 2401 Meaning in Interaction (Pragmatics)

Dawn is currently supervising (or has previously supervised) MAs/PhDs that: make use of corpus linguistics techniques; engage with pragmatic theory/approaches (historical and modern); focus upon impoliteness. She would also like to supervise theses that focus upon the courtroom (modern and historical).

Other

Member of ESRC Peer Review College, 2010+

External for Sheffield Hallam University (Work-based/independent studies) April 2008+

External grants/awards (to date = £118,340 approx)

99,938 euros   INTAS funding to study Linguistic and Ethnic Revival in 
                        Russia: From Policy to Cultural Diversity, 2006-2008, 
                       Co-bidder with C. Williams (History, UCLAN)
£4,996            AHRC ICT Methods Network funding to hold Workshop 
                       on Historical Text Mining, 7/2006, Co-organiser (with P. 
                       Rayson, Lancaster)  
                       [http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/events/htm06/]
£7369             Small Research Grant, British Academy, 5/2005-8/2005:  
                       'Scragg revisited: A quantitative investigation of spelling  
                       across the centuries’
£200              Overseas Conference Grant, British Academy, August 2005
£16,885          Unlocking the Word Hoard, Andrew W. Mellon 
                       Foundation, 2004-2005, Co-applicant (with Prof. M. 
                      Mueller, Northwestern University, USA)

Confereces/symposia (co-)organised

JOMEC’s School Research Symposium, 28-30 June 2010, UCLAN.
Two-day workshop on ‘Text-mining in the Digital Humanities: The Interface between Conceptual History, Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics’, 13 - 14 May 2010, Lancaster University.
ICAME-30 conference, 27-31 May 2009, Lancaster University.
Digital Resources in the Humanities (DRH) 2005 conference. September 2005, Lancaster University.