Roundtable with Discussant Dr Mathew Gillings (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business)

This event aims to open up conversations about the often overlooked challenges encountered during corpus linguistics research, which are frequently invisibilised in standard publications. We want to shed light on the complexities and issues that researchers face but rarely discuss in formal outlets.

Throughout the event, we will explore the following themes:

• Code-switching and multilingual corpora: Examining how code switching or multilingual data creates hurdles when applying traditional corpus methodologies – Chris Tang
• Non-standard language use in a spoken corpus of Turkish: Addressing challenges in tagging and analysing corpus of young speakers of Turkish – Esranur Efeoglu-Ozcan
• Corpus research and low literacy languages in Africa: Challenges arising from inconsistent spelling, limited resources, and the complexities of creating accurate corpora for sub-Saharan languages – Clyde Ancarno

During this roundtable, we will present our ongoing research to illustrate the particular hurdles we have encountered while working in these areas. Our presentations will be followed by a discussion with a guest discussant, Mathew Gillings.

We hope this event will offer valuable insights into the nuanced challenges that arise when conducting corpus linguistic research with ‘under-researched language varieties’, encouraging a deeper understanding of how these issues shape our work and the broader field.

Meet the speakers

Chris Tang is an applied linguist currently working in the areas of crisis, risk and health communication. He draws on frameworks and methodologies from cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and corpus linguistics within interdisciplinary projects on (e.g.) COVID-19, the climate crisis, mental health, gestational diabetes, with a specific focus on inclusion and crosslinguistic/cultural communication.

Esranur Efeoglu-Ozcan is a postdoctoral researcher, working in the areas of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. She specialises in spoken corpus compilation, contemporary spoken discourse, youth language practices, corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Her recent works focus on (poly)crisis discourses.

Clyde Ancarno is an applied linguist with an interest in multilingual education in linguistically diverse contexts and interdisciplinary applications in corpus linguistics. Her collaboration with Insa Nolte and Rebecca Jones on an ERC project focussed on inter-religious relations in southwest Nigeria has led her to explore how corpus linguistic methods can be enriched by the methodologies of (social) anthropology.

Mathew Gillings is an Assistant Professor at the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. His research interests lie primarily in corpus-assisted discourse studies, and he has applied to the method to a range of areas including business communication, deception, and (im)politeness. Much of this work takes a methodological angle, examining how the approach can be usefully triangulated with other methods of linguistic analysis. He is an Associate Editor of Pragmatics (John Benjamins), co-author of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CUP, 2023) and the author of Corpus Linguistic Approaches to Deception Detection (Routledge, 2024). Mathew also organised the panel discussion Dead ends, detours, and disappointments: Looking beyond ‘failed’ corpus research with Gerlinde Mautner at CL2023.