ABSTRACT
For many of people, the family is where everyone first observes parenting and relationships and it is where people make the first friendships. The corpus was primarily collected by university students, the majority of these were female and, therefore, the participants in Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT) share a very similar social background. The community of practice model stresses that the linguistic practices that both create and sustain groups such as the family emerge in the form of a shared linguistic repertoire and a corpus linguistic methodology provided us with the tools through which we were able to identify this repertoire. People argues that it would be of considerable benefit to interaction analysis, the community of practice and corpus linguistics to develop a system by which items such as these might be identified and annotated, both in small and large-scale studies.
