This book showcases the unique possibilities of corpus linguistic methodologies in engaging with and analysing language data from social media, surveying current approaches, and offering guidelines and best practices for doing language analysis. The book provides an overview of how language in social media has been approached by linguists and non-linguists, before delving into the identification of the datasets requirements needed to pursue investigations in social media, and of the technical aspects of particular platforms that may influence the analysis, such as emoticons, retweets, and metadata. Sample Python code, along with general guidelines for using it, is provided to empower researchers to apply these techniques in their own work, supported by actual examples from three real-life case studies. Di Cristofaro highlights the full potential of using these methodologies in analysing social media language data and the ways in which they might pave the way for future applications of data analysis and processing for corpus linguistics. The book will be key reading for researchers in corpus linguistics and linguists and social scientists interested in data-driven analysis of social media.

From Twitter to Reddit, Facebook, and WhatsApp – social media is a part of modern everyday life. Studying the language used on social media platforms presents great opportunities as well as challenges to corpus linguists. The contributions in Corpus Approaches to Social Media address technical, ethical, and methodological issues by showcasing in-depth social media studies as conducted by corpus scholars. The chapters are based on a variety of social media platforms and include corpus perspectives on the language of online communities, linguistic variation in short media texts, and the role of images in computer-mediated communication. A particularly strong point of the collection are the detailed accounts of the methodological aspects of working with social media corpora. The volume features research applying traditional corpus linguistic methods to social media data as well as novel and innovative research methods for the analysis of multimodal material and atypical corpus texts.

Corpus linguistics has now come of age and Corpus Approaches to Discourse equips students with the means to question, defend and refine the methodology. Looking at corpus linguistics in discourse research from a critical perspective, this volume is a call for greater reflexivity in the field. The chapters, each written by leading authorities, contain an overview of an emerging area and a case-study, presenting practical advice alongside theoretical reflection. Carefully structured with an introduction by the editors and a conclusion by leading researcher, Paul Baker, this is key reading for advanced students and researchers of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis.

Recent decades have seen a fundamental change and transformation in the commercialisation and popularisation of sports and sporting events. Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports uses corpus resources to offer new perspectives on the language and discourse of this increasingly popular and culturally significant area of research. Bringing together a range of empirical studies from leading scholars, this book bridges the gap between quantitative corpus approaches and more qualitative, multimodal discourse methods. Covering a wide range of sports, including football, cycling and basketball, the linguistic aspects of sports language are analysed across different genres and contexts. Highlighting the importance of studying the language of sports alongside its accompanying audio-visual modes of communication, chapters draw on new digitised collections of language to fully describe and understand the complexities of communication through various channels. In doing so, Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports not only offers exciting new insights into the language of sports but also extends the scope of corpus linguistics beyond traditional monomodal approaches to put multimodality firmly on the agenda.

Corpus Linguistics for Online Communication provides an instructive and practical guide to conducting research using methods in corpus linguistics in studies of various forms of online communication. Offering practical exercises and drawing on original data taken from online interactions, this book: introduces the basics of corpus linguistics, including what is involved in designing and building a corpus; reviews cutting-edge studies of online communication using corpus linguistics, foregrounding different analytical components to facilitate studies in professional discourse, online learning, public understanding of health issues and dating apps; showcases both freely-available corpora and the innovative tools that students and researchers can access to carry out their own research. Corpus Linguistics for Online Communication supports researchers and students in generating high quality, applied research and is essential reading for those studying and researching in this area.

Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide introduces the linguistic frameworks currently used to analyse language found in social media contexts. This highly accessible guidebook outlines the practical steps and ethical guidelines entailed when gathering linguistic data from social media sites and platforms. In this new edition, the authors update the range of social media interactions used as examples and draw attention to important developments such as “fake news” and new areas of debate such as hate speech. Expanding the geographical and multilingual aspects, this edition also includes examples from Asia and the Arabic-speaking world. With updated methods that help students study the language of social media from a multimodal perspective, the recent uptake in image sharing, video-chat, and graphicons will also be addressed. Each chapter begins with a clear summary of the topics covered and also suggests sources for further reading to supplement the initial discussion and case studies. This timely book is an essential guide for students of English language and linguistics, media, and communication studies.

This edited volume gathers corpus-based studies on topics including English grammar and discourses on media and health, mainly from a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective, in order to reveal the potential of SFL, which has been emphasized by Halliday. Various other perspectives, such as philosophy, statistics, genre studies, etc. are also included to promote SFL’s potential interaction with other theories. Though they employ a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, all the chapters focus on exploring language in use with the corpus method. The studies collected here are all original, unpublished research articles that address significant questions, deepen readers’ understanding of SFL, and promote its potential interaction with other theories. In addition, they demonstrate the great potential that SFL holds for solving language-related questions in a variety of discourses.

This monograph takes up recent advances in social network methods in sociology, together with data on economic segregation, in order to build a quantitative analysis of the class and network effects implicated in vowel change in a Southern American city. Studies of sociolinguistic variation in urban spaces have uncovered durable patterns of linguistic difference, such as the maintenance of blue collar/white collar distinctions in the case of stable linguistic variables. But the underlying interactional origins of these patterns, and the interactional reasons for their durability, are not well understood, due in part to the near-absence of large-scale network investigation. This book undertakes a sociolinguistic network analysis of data from the Raleigh corpus, a set of conversational interviews collected form natives of Raleigh, North Carolina, from 2008-2017. Acoustic analysis of the corpus shows the rapid, ongoing retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift and increasing participation in national vowel changes. The social distribution of these trends is explored via standard social factors such as occupation as well as innovative network variables, including a measure of nestedness in the community network. The book aims to pursue new network-based questions about sociolinguistic variation that can be applied to other corpora, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics as well as those interested in further understanding how existing quantitative network methods from sociological research might be applied to sociolinguistic data.

This book presents a collection of original research articles that showcase the state of the art of research in corpus and computational linguistic approaches to Chinese language teaching, learning and assessment. It offers a comprehensive set of corpus resources and natural language processing tools that are useful for teaching, learning and assessing Chinese as a second or foreign language; methods for implementing such resources and techniques in Chinese pedagogy and assessment; as well as research findings on the effectiveness of using such resources and techniques in various aspects of Chinese pedagogy and assessment.

Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics illustrates how sociolinguistic approaches and linguistic distributions from corpora can be effectively combined to produce meaningful studies of language use and language variation. Three major parts comprise the volume focusing on: (1) Corpora and the Study of Languages and Dialects, in particular, varieties of global Englishes; (2) Corpora and Social Demographics; and (3) Corpora and Register Characteristics. The 14 peer-reviewed, new, and original chapters explore language variation related to regional dialectology, gender, sexuality, age, race, ‘nation,’ workplace discourse, diachronic change, and social media and web registers. Invited contributors made use of systematically-designed general and specialized corpora, sound research questions, methodologies (e.g., keyword analysis, multi-dimensional analysis, clusters, and collocations), and logical/credible interpretive techniques. Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics is an important resource for researchers and graduate students in the fields of sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and applied linguistics.