ABSTRACT
The aim of this current chapter is to give an account of how corpora and corpus-linguistic methods can be of help to the researcher who wants to pursue a sociolinguistic research question. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics can be seen as two related but historically distinct research traditions. While sociolinguistics is generally considered a specific branch or a paradigm within linguistics, corpus linguistics is not. It is argued that there are obvious advantages associated with the use of corpus linguistics in sociolinguistics. The first-generation spoken corpora, like the London–Lund Corpus of spoken English, contain orthographic transcriptions with prosodic annotation, enabling studies of prosody, discourse, grammar and lexis. Pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics often concerns phenomena at the discourse level, such as turn-taking, code-switching, the structure of narratives, etc. The chapter gives a brief account of previous and ongoing sociolinguistic research which shows how corpora can be used in studies of language variation at different analytical levels, such as phonetics, syntax and pragmatics.
