ABSTRACT
Apps, chatbots, virtual reality, digital assistants, facial recognition, ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, the internet of things, fourth industrial revolution, online multi-player video games, etc. We are entangled with the digital, and our thinking and behaviour are affected by this entanglement. The more entangled we are, the more we operate as a different kind of human – “a posthuman”. Scholarly reflection on the posthuman condition is “posthumanism”.
This chapter situates corpus linguistics within posthumanism. Section 2 outlines some key posthumanist perspectives. Section 3 highlights salient ways in which corpus linguistics has been implicitly posthuman for some time. In contrast, Section 4 demonstrates an explicitly posthuman use of corpus linguistics. The final Section 5 encourages a more explicit engagement with posthumanism, and the philosophy of technology more generally, to open new possibilities for corpus linguistics.
