Tony McEnery
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tonymcenery.bsky.social
Tony McEnery
@tonymcenery.bsky.social
Professor of English Language & Linguistics, Lancaster University. Advisory Chair Shanghai ISU. Adjunct chair Xi’an JTU. All views are my own.
Reposted by Tony McEnery
The (short) book to go with the talk:
November 11, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
At the beautiful SHISU campus 🇨🇳, getting ready for a corpus linguistics workshop with @tonymcenery.bsky.social and @paulari.bsky.social. Corpus is never lost in translation ✨📚

#CorpusLinguistics #LancsBox #ChinaTour #GlobalLearning

@corpussocialsci.bsky.social

@lancasteruni.bsky.social
November 11, 2025 at 1:20 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
4 Nov 1605: In the nighttime #otd Thomas Knyvett searches vaults under the House of Lords which results in arrest of Guido Fawkes (NT/BM)
November 4, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
“Forensic linguistics is an attempt to improve the delivery of justice through the analysis of language”

In this episode of The We Society @timgrant123.bsky.social @aifl.bsky.social discusses how language analysis can help solve crimes & lead to justice for all: media.leverhulme.ac.uk/podcast/grant
November 5, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
New Date Announced: We’re delighted to announce that Teun A. van Dijk (Centre of Discourse Studies, Barcelona) will now be joining us on Tuesday 11th November, 1–2pm (UK time) for his talk: Title: Discourse and Ideologies of the Radical Right
Location: MS Teams

Online link: lnkd.in/eAXSgT6r
November 2, 2025 at 10:25 AM
New issue of Annual Review of Applied Linguistics out now - its theme is Artificial Intelligence in Applied Linguistics. Well worth a look, plenty of open access content (full disclosure - I have a paper in it 😀): www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Latest volume | Annual Review of Applied Linguistics | Cambridge Core
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
www.cambridge.org
October 31, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
Newest LLM tell/quirk in coding assignments this semester: instead of generating code based on the CSVs that I provide, LLMs have been inventing datasets with rnorm() and sample() (and an obligatory set.seed(42)) and then making plots with the fake data.

I'm so tired.
October 30, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
People are misled by low false positive/negative rates for some AI applications but these can mean large numbers of high-impact cases that are costly to resolve. The rate matters but also the actual size of the denominator - and the impact of error.
Somebody at HMRC needs to be canned for this idiotic ‘fraud-detection’ idea. And I fear future use of AI in welfare cases might well produce this kind of story regularly (as they have in Nevada for example).
UK woman who booked Oslo flight but did not fly loses child benefit ‘because she emigrated’
Exclusive: HMRC told Lisa Morris-Almond there was no record of her return to UK, but she did not take the trip
www.theguardian.com
October 30, 2025 at 12:11 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
The problem with linguists proposing attention to language in the world is that their solution often seems to be just make people linguists. Which isn’t tenable, nor reasonable.
October 29, 2025 at 6:46 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
Regarding the feelings of inadequacy engendered by the grant game, the great Jan Blommaert said it well:

alternative-democracy-research.org/2015/06/10/r...
Rationalizing the unreasonable: there are no good academics in the EU
Jan Blommaert  Attracting external funding has become, everywhere, one of the main priorities of academics, and writing funding application has consequently also become one of their main tasks. The…
alternative-democracy-research.org
October 24, 2025 at 5:20 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
TruthScraper and a number of other corpus collection tools are available on my homepage corpustools.prendrelangue.fr

Do pay a visit, and please provide feedback!

#linguistics #corpus #discourseanalysis
October 22, 2025 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
Most studies of language contact focus on speech — how we borrow words to fill gaps or express new ideas.
But a new paper shows that language mixing isn’t always about meaning — sometimes it’s about context, identity, and the world that writing inhabits.
doi.org/10.25189/267...
October 22, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
A curious approach from people who don't like the concept of immigration
October 22, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
📣 After an initial hiccup 😅 it really IS out!

New to #CorpusTools, TruthScraper is a browser extension that lets you build a corpus of posts from Truth Social.

More info & download links 👉 fmoncomble.github.io/truthscraper/

Bug reports and feature requests welcome!

#linguistics
October 22, 2025 at 7:36 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
Are you a learned society looking to deliver EDI interventions but aren’t sure where to start? As part of our EDI Project we have a number of Q&As with social science learned societies sharing their insights & learnings from delivering their own EDI interventions. acss.org.uk/category/edi...
October 21, 2025 at 11:44 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
The outcome of organisational reviews captured:“Everything was over-organised and so failed to work properly. The new bureaucracy, which was supposed to impose order, was still enjoying itself writing memos and making out permits, and everything was delayed” (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday)
October 18, 2025 at 10:16 AM
The outcome of organisational reviews captured:“Everything was over-organised and so failed to work properly. The new bureaucracy, which was supposed to impose order, was still enjoying itself writing memos and making out permits, and everything was delayed” (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday)
October 18, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
📢 Registration is open for the Language Testing Forum 2025.
Venue: University of Southampton
Dates: 21st – 23rd November 2025
Join us in celebrating the 45th anniversary of the LTF and the 10th anniversary of the UKALTA! #LTF2025
👉 More information is here: www.southampton.ac.uk/humanities/n...
Language Testing Forum 2025
Language Testing Forum 2025
www.southampton.ac.uk
October 16, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
Roll up, roll up. Get your snake oil and miracle cures here!

✅ Precision medicine
✅ Automated causal inference
✅ Polygenic scores
✅ 1000+ outcome prediction models
✅ In sillico trials
✅ Exposomics
✅ Anything involve 'AI'
✅ Any other trend, shortcut, or bandwagon!
October 16, 2025 at 10:18 AM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
We are looking for new committee members! If you would like to join the BAAL Corpus SIG as Meetings Secretary or as an Ordinary Member, please get in touch! You can learn more about the SIG at our website:
BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG
BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG
baal-clsig.weebly.com
October 15, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
Recently we started the @leverhulme.ac.uk project Memories of China with a visit to the Lady Lever Art Gallery to see William Hesketh Lever’s Chinese porcelain and art collection. Well worth the visit!
October 15, 2025 at 1:59 PM
Reposted by Tony McEnery
My new Open Access article in Discourse and Society with Rickey Lu: Holistic, nurturing and sustainable: Discursive shift in corporate social responsibility reporting. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com
October 15, 2025 at 8:04 AM
Recently we started the @leverhulme.ac.uk project Memories of China with a visit to the Lady Lever Art Gallery to see William Hesketh Lever’s Chinese porcelain and art collection. Well worth the visit!
October 15, 2025 at 1:59 PM