Architecture today is dominated by international design firms that produce spectacular buildings across the world. But how did architecture become global? This...

Architecture today is dominated by international design firms that produce spectacular buildings across the world. But how did architecture become global? This module asks how architectural knowledge and styles spread across continents during the past 150 years. We will confront how European colonialism exported architecture and urban planning to North Africa, the Middle East and India. How did the striking architecture of universal expositions transmit ideas about modernity? How did the so-called International Style of modernism spread through Europe, the United States, Japan, China and South America? Guided by the work of postcolonial theorists and historians, we will examine the reactions to an apparently global form of modern architecture in the twentieth century. Ultimately, we ask if there is any room for regional difference in globalised architectural production?

ENGLISH LANGUAGE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Corpus linguistics is a research field with a long pedigree. Early grammarians like Otto Jespersen (1909) saw empirical observation as crucial to his...

Corpus linguistics is a research field with a long pedigree. Early grammarians like Otto Jespersen (1909) saw empirical observation as crucial to his linguistic study, but his sources were limited to his personal library. In the 1950s and 60s the early Brown and Survey of English Usage corpora were compiled on paper, but computer databases have transformed the field. Corpora have developed in three directions: increasing scale (as much as multiple billions of words), specialism (e.g. dialects and rare languages) and linguistic enrichment (e.g. parsing, pragmatic annotation, semantic markup and other rich annotation).

This module focuses on English language corpus linguistics, centred around two UCL parsed corpora of speech and writing, ICE-GB and DCPSE. Students will be shown how to use these corpora to carry out empirical research into the grammar of modern British English. It addresses key methodological questions of research in corpus linguistics including empirical vs. theoretical approaches to linguistic data, the role of theory in data analysis, distinctions in levels of research processes, and practical consequences for research design. Investigating language change over time and psycholinguistic priming research are discussed in depth.

As befits a research-led module, the course is delivered by active academic researchers at the UCL Survey of English Usage, a research group based in the English Department and the first corpus linguistics research group in Europe.