(Ebook) Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics (Edinburgh Sociolinguistics) by Paul Baker ISBN 9780748627363, 0748627367

(Ebook) Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics (Edinburgh Sociolinguistics) by Paul Baker ISBN 9780748627363, 0748627367

Over the past twenty or so years, an approach to the study of language referred to

as corpus linguistics has largely become accepted as an important and useful mode of

linguistic inquiry. While corpora (or large collections of computerised texts, usually

carefully sampled in order to be representative of a particular language variety) were

fi rst mainly used as aids to lexicography and pedagogy, they have more recently been

deployed for a wider range of purposes. To illustrate, a sample of recent publications

in linguistics includes Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics (Stubbs

2001), Corpora in Applied Linguistics (Hunston 2002), Corpus Stylistics (Semino

and Short 2004), Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies (Olohan 2004), Using

Corpora in Discourse Analysis (Baker 2006), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Corpus-

Based Approaches to Syntax and Lexis (Gries 2006), Corpus- Based Approaches to

Metaphor and Metonymy (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006) and Corpus Linguistics

Beyond the Word: Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse (Fitzpatrick 2007). What

readers might note from this list is the absence of a book to date which details a

corpus- based approach to sociolinguistics. Such a pairing has not been completely

ignored. In their early overview of the fi eld, McEnery and Wilson (1996) have a

short section on corpora and sociolinguistics, which mainly discusses what is possible,

rather than what has been done (at that point there was little to report), while

Hunston (2002: 159–61) discusses how corpora can be used in order to describe

sociolinguistic, diachronic and register variation. Additionally, Beeching (2006) has

a short chapter on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of sociolinguistic corpora in an edited collection

by Wilson et al. Th ese sections of books point to the fact that some form of

‘corpus sociolinguistics’ is possible, although it might appear that corpus linguistics

has made only a relatively small impact on sociolinguistics.