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Research on language attitudes and perceptual dialectology has shown that north-east English is one of the most widely recognized and positively evaluated varieties in Britain. There is also a rich tradition of dialect writing associated with the region, and a long history of both ‘folk’ and scholarly attention to local forms of language – for example, it is the only part of England to have a major corpus devoted to it – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. However, one element is missing from the otherwise well-charted dialectological terrain. Dr Michael Pearce has addressed this gap in a chapter published in Perspectives on Northern Englishes (Mouton de Gruyter, 2017), which gives an account of localized forms in the ‘linguistic landscape’ (that is, the public display and representation of written language on road signs, advertisements, house names, vehicles, and so on). This first foray into an under-researched aspect of the region’s local linguistic ecology descr

PhD student Maria Fotiadou has recently given a paper at the 9th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (Birmingham University). Her paper explored the issue of competitiveness in the ‘graduate job market’ and the notion of ‘employability’, as presented by Universities in the UK through their career services webpages. It is part of a wider project that seeks to understand the role of careers services inside academia. With a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis methods and Corpus Linguistics tools, the analysis focuses on identifying, interpreting, explaining and evaluating (Baker and McEnery, 2015, pp. 2-3) the ‘reality’ presented by these services as students are expected to ‘invest’ their time at university in getting prepared for the transition from HE to the workplace.