The FORGE is delighted to announce our first external guest speaker of 2017: Former Detective Chief Superintendent Laurence Carr (Merseyside Police).

Details of his talk are below.

TITLE
The practicalities of police interviews

ABSTRACT
Please be aware that this talk will involve reference to criminal cases.

This presentation aims to examine the practical obstacles that exist in police interview situations and how police in the UK have developed a method to try to overcome those obstacles so as to maximise disclosure and dialogue. It touches upon the development of the methodology, examines what the interview actually consists of, contrasts and compares differing techniques and examines the arguments for and against. It also looks at such things as how to overcome silence, how to use silence, the power dynamic in the room, effective listening, managing the physical environment, dealing with deliberate obstruction, rapport building, and effective conversation management amongst other topics.

BIO
Laurence Carr spent 30 years in Merseyside Police achieving the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent. He led the Force Major Incident Team and was heavily involved in police interviews in numerous contexts, both as a practitioner and as a strategist. He now leads the Behavioural Assessment Unit at a leading financial services company.

TIME & PLACE
W17, 1200-1400, Thu 02^nd Mar, George Fox Lecture Theatre 3
Note that the talk itself will run from 1200-1300, and Laurence will stay for a further hour in case anyone wishes to chat with him one-to-one.

All are welcome to attend.

UCREL’s CRS and FORGE are delighted to announce a joint talk by our upcoming internal speakers: Matt Edwards and Steve Wattam (Computing & Communications). Details of their talk are below:

TITLE
Why privacy makes privacy research hard

ABSTRACT
Identity resolution capability for social networking profiles is important for a range of purposes, from open-source intelligence applications to forming semantic web connections. Yet research in this area is hampered by the lack of access to ground-truth data linking the identities of profiles from different networks. Almost all data sources previously used by researchers are no longer available, and historic datasets are both of decreasing relevance to the modern social networking landscape and ethically troublesome regarding the preservation and publication of personal data. We present and evaluate a method which provides researchers in identity resolution with easy access to a realistically-challenging labelled dataset of online profiles, drawing on four of the currently largest and most influential online social networks. We validate the comparability of samples drawn through this method and discuss the implications of this mechanism for researchers and potential alternatives and extensions.

TIME & PLACE
1300-1400, Mon 06^th Feb, County South B89

NOTE
Though the speakers are computer scientists, they are aiming this talk at a non-technical audience. This presentation may be of interest to audiences beyond linguistics and/or computing, including those researching big data, online privacy, internet law/criminology, psychology, sociology, digital anthropology and culture, and so forth.

All are welcome to attend.

Please note that Alisdair Gillespie’s talk has been cancelled. We will hopefully reschedule this for the coming academic year.

Please note that Marton Petyko’s room has changed. This talk will now be held in County South B89 (not C89 as advertised previously).

FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Marton Petyko (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
The motives attributed to the assumed trolls on three Hungarian left-wing political blogs

ABSTRACT
Although trolling has become a subject of increasing academic interest in the past 10-15 years, it has several aspects that have not been studied extensively yet. This talk attempts to contribute to the academic study of three under-researched aspects of trolling, namely (1) trolling in online informal political discourse, (2) trolling in non-English computer-mediated interactions and (3) the assumed motives attributed to trolls. I will discuss the results of a corpus-assisted case study that aimed to identify the motives that participants explicitly attribute to those whom they call trolls in 178 comment threads, consisting of 55,276 comments on three prominent Hungarian left-wing political blogs, B1, Örülünk, Vincent? and Varánusz. Thus, the paper is concerned with the assumed motives that participants attribute to the supposed trolls and not with the actual reasons for trolling in these online interactions. First, I will present four motives that the participants repeatedly attribute to the assumed trolls in the examined comment threads. Then, I will discuss how these assumed motives affect the way participants discursively portray the alleged trolls and depict perceived trolling in the investigated computer-mediated interactions.

TIME & PLACE
1200-1300, Mon 12^th Dec, County South B89

All are welcome to attend.

The Lancaster University Phonetics Lab and FORGE are delighted to announce a joint talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Dr Ricky Chan (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Tone coarticulation and implications for forensic speaker comparison

ABSTRACT
A major goal in forensic speaker comparison research is to identify variables in speech that are useful for characterising speakers. While research on individual phonetic parameters abound, few studies have focused on the between-speaker differences in sounds under the influence from connected speech processes, let alone with an explicit comparison with sounds produced in their citation forms. In this talk, I will report an experiment on the speaker-discriminatory powers of lexical tones under different speaking rate and tonal contexts, which are two main factors contributing to tone coarticulation. 20 native Cantonese speakers and 20 native Mandarin speakers were recruited and read speech in two speaking rates (normal vs. fast) and two tonal contexts (compatible vs. conflicting) were elicited. Results based on discriminant analysis show that coarticulated tones tend to perform worse in speaker identification than tones in their citation forms. Implications for forensic speaker comparison will be discussed.

TIME & PLACE
1200-1300, Mon 21^st Nov, County South C89

All are welcome to attend.

FORGErs may be interested in the inaugural meeting of the DisTex research group. Their first speaker will be Matteo Fuoli (Lund University). Details of his paper are below:

Title
Analyzing corporate trust-repair discourse using corpus and experimental techniques

Abstract
Trust is a valuable relational asset for companies, and an important precondition for their legitimacy. But trust is also a fragile commodity; it takes a long time to build, and just moments to destroy. In this talk, I will present the results of two studies that investigate how companies use discourse strategically in order to restore public trust in them after episodes of wrongdoing. In the first study, I combine Appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005) and manual corpus annotation techniques to examine the trust-repair discourse strategies deployed by BP’s CEO in his letters to shareholders after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. In the second study, I use experimental methods to test the perlocutionary effects of two basic strategies that are commonly used by corporations in situations where trust is at stake: apology and denial. These two studies offer new insights into the discursive dynamics of trust, and demonstrate the usefulness of mixing corpus and experimental methods for the analysis of discourse.

Time & place
1600, Mon 24^th Oct, County South B89

All are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first external guest speaker: Holly Anderson. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
Forensic linguistics in practice

NOTES
This will be of especial interest to those looking to go into a career in forensic linguistics, however please note the following two points:

This talk will involve language and images that some may find disturbing and/or offensive. This talk is not suitable for anyone under the age of sixteen.

Mobile phones and recording technology must be switched off throughout the session. Recording, photographing, or otherwise live-broadcasting (e.g. via Twitter) any part of the talk is strictly forbidden.

TIME & PLACE
1200-1300, Wed 12^th Oct, Cavendish Colloquium

BE AWARE THAT THIS PRESENTATION CONTAINS EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speakers: Prof Jonathan Culpeper (Linguistics & English Language), Prof Paul Iganski (Law), and Dr Abe Sweiry (Law). Details of their talk are below:

TITLE
Linguistic impoliteness and religiously aggravated hate crime in England and Wales

ABSTRACT
Despite its centrality to religiously aggravated hate crime recorded in England and Wales, the nature of the language used has been neglected in research. This paper, based on a unique dataset, aims to rectify this. It takes its approach from the field of linguistic impoliteness, a field that has yet to consider hate crime. Therein lies our second aim: to consider whether impoliteness notions can be usefully extended to the language of hate crime. In our data, we examine, in particular, conventionalized impoliteness formulae, insults, threats, incitement and taboo words. Whilst we reveal some linguistic support for the way religiously aggravated hate crime is framed in the law and discussed in the legal literature, we highlight areas of neglect and potential ambiguity. Regarding impoliteness, we demonstrate its effectiveness as an approach to this data, but we also highlight areas of neglect in that literature too, notably, non-conditional threats and incitement.

TIME & PLACE
1200-1300, Mon 10^th Oct, County South C89

All are welcome to attend.

BE AWARE THAT THIS PRESENTATION CONTAINS EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE

The FORGE is delighted to announce our next external guest speakers of 2016: the Army’s Intelligence Corps and Educational and Training Services (ETS) Branch. Details of this talk are below:

TITLE
Military Linguist: Understanding the Threat

SPEAKERS/GUESTS
WO2 David Thomas, Intelligence Corps Selection Warrant Officer
Capt Christopher Browne ETS (Pool of Linguists)
Sgt Scott Huntley, the Corps Selection Sgt

ABSTRACT
We are pleased to announce that the Army’s Intelligence Corps and Educational and Training Services (ETS) Branch will be joining us on campus to discuss their experiences of being linguists. The roles of linguists in the military are varied, ranging from interpreting and offering cultural insights and explanations, through to analysing intercepted communications and combating the cyber threat.
 
The Army employs people as linguists who have never studied languages before, providing they pass a language aptitude test and the selection process. There are two routes in: the Intelligence Corps, and the Educational and Training Services (ETS) Branch. Our speakers will discuss both full time career options, and the opportunities for part-time employment in the Army Reserve, particularly in the ETS. They will also remain for approximately an hour after the talk itself for one-to-one questions, during which time they will be happy to discuss the opportunities available to work in the Intelligence Corps for non-linguists.
 
In short, this talk will particularly appeal to linguists broadly defined (forensic linguistics, modern languages, EFL/TEFL/TESOL, etc.) but it is likely also to be of interest to anyone who speaks another language besides English fluently, and/or has an interest in language, global peacekeeping, travel, and understanding other cultures.

TIME/PLACE
1000-1100 (talk), 1100-1200 (one-to-one Q&A session), Friday 11th March, Cavendish Colloquium in Faraday Building. (Go through Faraday’s main doors. At the top of the stairs, take a sharp left and go up to the next floor.)

All staff, students, and visitors are welcome to attend.