“Corpus Linguistics and Triangulation”

Jesse Egbert, Northern Arizona University

The purpose of this workshop is to introduce the variety of ways that corpora and corpus linguistic research methods can be triangulated with other data and methods in linguistics. Methodological triangulation has been used for decades by social scientists as a means of explaining behavior by studying it from two or more perspectives. It is becoming increasingly common in empirical linguistics and applied linguistics for researchers to triangulate corpus linguistics with methods and data from other research areas in linguistics. This workshop will begin with a survey of corpus linguistic research methods, both quantitative and qualitative. We will explore the strengths and limitations of these various methods, as well as how they have been used (or could potentially be used) to answer linguistic research questions. Building on this foundation, we will turn our attention to how corpora and corpus linguistic methods can be triangulated with other data and methods in the broader field of linguistics. There are three goals for this portion of the class: (1) Showcase a variety of state of the art research methods in linguistics outside of the realm of corpus linguistics (CL); (2) Explore a wide range of empirical studies in linguistics which triangulate non-CL methods with CL methods; (3) Investigate the extent to which non-CL research methods can complement CL methods to enhance our understanding of linguistic processes, variation, and applications.