ABSTRACT
In the last decade, the availability of corpora and the technological advancements of corpus tools have increased dramatically. Applied linguists have greater access to data from around the world and in a variety of languages through websites, blogs, and social networking sites, and there is a high level of interest among these scholars in applying corpora and corpus-based methods to other research areas, particularly sociolinguistics.
This innovative guidebook presents a systematic, in-depth account of using corpora in sociolinguistics. It introduces and expands the application of corpora and corpus approaches and tools in sociolinguistic research, surveys the growing number of studies in corpus-based sociolinguistics, and provides instructions and options for designing and developing corpus-based studies. Readers will find practical information on such contemporary topics as workplace registers, megacorpora, and using the web as a corpus. Vignettes, case studies, discussion questions, and activities throughout further enhance students’ involvement with the material and provide opportunities for hands-on practice of the methods discussed. Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics is a comprehensive and accessible guide, a must-read for any student or scholar interested in exploring this popular and promising approach to sociolinguistic research.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |68 pages
Introduction to Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics
chapter |16 pages
Sociolinguistic Investigations of Variation
chapter |11 pages
Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics
chapter |18 pages
Corpora and Corpus Tools
chapter |9 pages
Corpus Design and Representativeness
part |146 pages
Survey of Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Studies
chapter |35 pages
Corpora and the Study of Languages and Dialects
chapter |18 pages
Corpus-Based Studies of Gender, Sexuality, and Age
chapter |26 pages
Politeness and Stance
chapter |27 pages
Workplace Discourse
chapter |18 pages
Language Change: Diachronic Studies of Change
chapter |20 pages
Web Registers
part |75 pages
Conducting Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Studies