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Invited Speakers: Plenary
Professor Eric Friginal
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong SAR, China
Eric Friginal is Professor and Head of the Department of English and Communication and Director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR.
Before moving to Hong Kong, he was Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL and Director of International Programs at the College of Arts and Sciences, Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA, USA). He specializes in applied corpus linguistics, quantitative research, language policy and planning, technology and language teaching, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication, discipline-specific writing, and the analysis of spoken professional discourse in the workplace.
His recent publications include The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis (2021), co-edited with Jack Hardy; Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of Discipline, Register, and Writer Expertise, co-edited with Ute Römer and Viviana Cortes (John Benjamins, 2020); English in Global Aviation: Context, Research, and Pedagogy, with Elizabeth Mathews and Jennifer Roberts (Bloomsbury, 2019); and Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers: New Tools, Online Resources, and Classroom Activities (Routledge, 2018). He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of Applied Corpus Linguistics (ACORP) Journal (with Paul Thompson) published by Elsevier.
Unveiling the Intersection of Corpus Linguistics, Generative AI, and Spoken (Philippine) English: Pioneering New Approaches and Applications
Corpus Linguistics (CL) is widely recognized as a methodological approach that leverages corpora and computational tools to analyze patterns within public discourses. Its aim is to gain fresh insights into the usage and interpretation of language within specific contexts (Thompson & Friginal, 2020). Over the past two decades, my research has focused on the exploration of real-world, recorded, and transcribed texts of spoken communication across various domains. Notably, my work has emphasized the examination of talk in multicultural and multimodal workplaces, with a particular emphasis on Filipino professionals. Traditionally, the process of designing, compiling, and annotating spoken corpora has been a labor-intensive endeavor. However, the advent of Generative AI innovations holds great promise for advancing this field by providing new directions and opportunities. Pioneering endeavors, like the annotation of multimodal spoken corpora, e.g., the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE) and the ITACorp Project at Penn State University, have sought to capture socio-phonetic features of speech, space, and movement through contextual transcriptions and modalities of spoken texts in orthographic form. The convergence of Generative AI and CL applications holds the potential to usher in a new era of advanced automated corpus processing that incorporates underlying marked speech modalities. My theoretical and analytical framework places utmost importance on identifying discursive practices within spoken corpora, encompassing sociocultural structures and task dimensions. I specifically focus on speakers' comprehension of role relationships, discoursal goals and objectives, cultural and racial identities, as well as power dynamics within the workplace (Baker, 2021; Friginal, 2020; Vine, 2020). In this presentation, I will share and discuss my recent interconnected studies, which explore linguistic patterns and distributions within spoken English texts, and their broad societal implications at macro and micro levels. I will particularly highlight future research directions in the study of spoken Philippine English across various domains and registers.