We are delighted to welcome Prof. Bénédicte Guillaume from the University of Toulon and Babel Laboratory for our next ROLLS seminar!

Title: The language of intimacy in Britain in the 2000s: some observations drawn from the Mass-Observation Project corpus

? 7 October
? 1–2 pm
? Fulton 101 or Teams

The language of intimacy in Britain in the 2000s: some observations drawn from the Mass- Observation Project corpus (2000s). Bénédicte GUILLAUME (University of Toulon, France / Babel Laboratory) 

 In this talk, I aim to present ongoing research which explores the possibility of studying the Mass-Observation Project archives (1981–) from a linguistic perspective. This British corpus, which focuses on civilisation and sociology, has not been the subject of many linguistic studies, with the exception of Robinson (2025). The Project is in fact a revival, several decades after the end of the original venture, of Mass-Observation, an anthropological experiment launched in the 1930s by a group of intellectuals at odds with the established powers (Jefferey 1978). I shall focus in particular on a small corpus dating from 2001, comprising responses to a directive on the topic of ‘Courting and dating’, which will enable me to examine some characteristics of the language of intimacy, from a discourse analysis perspective. Another methodological issue is to consider the extent to which a quantitative and a qualitative approach can be combined from a linguistic perspective regarding such a specific corpus.

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