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Article published In:
Corpus Linguistics in Language and Sexuality Studies: Developments and Prospects
Edited by Heiko Motschenbacher
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 7:2] 2018
► pp. 145–174

Corpus linguistics in language and sexuality studies

Taking stock and looking ahead

| Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway

As an introduction to the special issue, this paper presents an overview of previous corpus linguistic work in the field of language and sexuality and discusses the compatibility of corpus linguistic methodology with queer linguistics as a central theoretical approach in language and sexuality studies. The discussion is structured around five prototypical aspects of corpus linguistics that may be deemed problematic from a poststructuralist, queer linguistic perspective: quantification and associated notions of objectivity, reliance on linguistic forms and formal presence, concentration on highly frequent features, reliance on categories, and highlighting of differences. It is argued that none of these aspects rules out an application of corpus linguistic techniques within queer theoretically informed linguistic work per se and that it is rather the way these techniques are employed that can be seen as more or less compatible with queer linguistics. To complement the theoretical discussion, a collocation analysis of sexual descriptive adjectives in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is conducted in an attempt to address some of the issues raised. The concluding section makes suggestions for future research.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, queer linguistics, language and sexuality, methodology, sexual descriptive adjectives, collocation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Taking stock: Corpus-based studies in the field of language and sexuality
  • 3.Corpus linguistics and queer linguistic challenges
    • 3.1Quantification and objectivity
    • 3.2Foregrounding of highly frequent items
    • 3.3Reliance on form and formal presence
    • 3.4Categories as analytical foundation
    • 3.5Difference focus
  • 4.Methodological considerations
  • 5.Usage patterns of sexual descriptive adjectives: A collocation analysis
  • 6.Conclusion: Looking ahead
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 27 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17019.mot
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