Corpus linguistics in language and sexuality studies
Taking stock and looking ahead
Heiko Motschenbacher | 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.
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