Corpus Linguistics introduction
Going into English was a decision I made a very long time ago, and never looked back until I entered grad school. In a lot of ways, literature is the reason I'm so successful now. Growing up where I did, there were three pastimes: get high, get drunk, or get pregnant. I built a fourth option of play video games and read books. When I ran out of books to read, I read encyclopedias and studied dictionaries.
This saved my early education. Being from an area that was a mixture of methlab trailer parks and high value ranch land, teachers would peg a student for success or failure by the first week. Because I always had my nose in a book and taught myself a few years of schooling at home, I guess I was assumed to be from the ranch land. Not that being white didn't help immensely.
Growing up, I became aware of the inequities of the world quickly. My friends who were just as smart as me were pegged for failure for no real reason. I grew up wanting to fix that, and becoming a teacher who wouldn't give up on them seemed like a good way to go. That thought drove me through undergrad, and died in grad school.
As an undergrad, I learned literary theories and started creating my own with the intention of fixing all the problems I saw. The problem was, everything in literature is subjective. I could convince everyone in liberal arts, but to really effect change, you need more than pretty words. You need hard data, numbers, and statistics. I grew jealous of my friends in other subjects whose contributions to a better world were palpable.
Homosexuality must be natural, we've observed it in over 1,500 species in the natural world. We figured out that the fetal brain develops totally separate from the genitals, and 1 in 100 babies are born intersex, so transgender people are natural occurrences who deserve rights. By age five, children in poverty were observed to have less cognitive function than those who are born into privilege, we need extra resources for them.
I went into literature wanting to save the world, but I found that all it taught me was the extent of what's wrong with it and left me completely helpless to change it. Burned out, discouraged, and honestly ready to drop out, I took my first linguistics class as a graduate student.
Now, I love linguistics, but it was always more of pet subject. Something I did for fun when I was getting bored or overwhelmed. I'd play with etymology, tell people that really "curiosity killed the cat" is actually about worrying. And I wanted to learn other languages. But, I didn't have enough exposure to form an opinion outside of it being fun.
The class I took was on world Englishes, and I first developed a strong interest in defending varieties of English from assumptions of error. I could help people, and for once I had the hard data to back me up. I was loving the class, and then we did a project with ICE (international corpus of English). I was completely hooked after that.
I could suddenly use those precious numbers that other classes were lacking. I asked if corpus methods could be used to study literature. I found that others had already thought of this, and were laying the foundation for a whole new understanding of literature. Instead of relying on the subjective methods I was taught, San Segundo (2016) showed empirically that characters written by Dickens contained consistent speech verbs to develop character. Even better, studies were done to show what language makes Shakespeare's poetry aesthetically pleasing.
This opened up new avenues for me. With the BYU COCA, I looked for portrayals of different minority groups in comparison and quickly found that in media, they are consistently portrayed negatively. I could test my theories that female characters have less agency on an empirical level. One could argue that my reading of The Monk is skewed by perception, but they can't argue against hard data. And all that fun literary stuff I enjoy? Frequency searches opened up so many new ways of reading a text.
Next: Corpus ideas
This saved my early education. Being from an area that was a mixture of methlab trailer parks and high value ranch land, teachers would peg a student for success or failure by the first week. Because I always had my nose in a book and taught myself a few years of schooling at home, I guess I was assumed to be from the ranch land. Not that being white didn't help immensely.
Growing up, I became aware of the inequities of the world quickly. My friends who were just as smart as me were pegged for failure for no real reason. I grew up wanting to fix that, and becoming a teacher who wouldn't give up on them seemed like a good way to go. That thought drove me through undergrad, and died in grad school.
As an undergrad, I learned literary theories and started creating my own with the intention of fixing all the problems I saw. The problem was, everything in literature is subjective. I could convince everyone in liberal arts, but to really effect change, you need more than pretty words. You need hard data, numbers, and statistics. I grew jealous of my friends in other subjects whose contributions to a better world were palpable.
Homosexuality must be natural, we've observed it in over 1,500 species in the natural world. We figured out that the fetal brain develops totally separate from the genitals, and 1 in 100 babies are born intersex, so transgender people are natural occurrences who deserve rights. By age five, children in poverty were observed to have less cognitive function than those who are born into privilege, we need extra resources for them.
I went into literature wanting to save the world, but I found that all it taught me was the extent of what's wrong with it and left me completely helpless to change it. Burned out, discouraged, and honestly ready to drop out, I took my first linguistics class as a graduate student.
Now, I love linguistics, but it was always more of pet subject. Something I did for fun when I was getting bored or overwhelmed. I'd play with etymology, tell people that really "curiosity killed the cat" is actually about worrying. And I wanted to learn other languages. But, I didn't have enough exposure to form an opinion outside of it being fun.
The class I took was on world Englishes, and I first developed a strong interest in defending varieties of English from assumptions of error. I could help people, and for once I had the hard data to back me up. I was loving the class, and then we did a project with ICE (international corpus of English). I was completely hooked after that.
I could suddenly use those precious numbers that other classes were lacking. I asked if corpus methods could be used to study literature. I found that others had already thought of this, and were laying the foundation for a whole new understanding of literature. Instead of relying on the subjective methods I was taught, San Segundo (2016) showed empirically that characters written by Dickens contained consistent speech verbs to develop character. Even better, studies were done to show what language makes Shakespeare's poetry aesthetically pleasing.
This opened up new avenues for me. With the BYU COCA, I looked for portrayals of different minority groups in comparison and quickly found that in media, they are consistently portrayed negatively. I could test my theories that female characters have less agency on an empirical level. One could argue that my reading of The Monk is skewed by perception, but they can't argue against hard data. And all that fun literary stuff I enjoy? Frequency searches opened up so many new ways of reading a text.
Next: Corpus ideas
Interesting account of the gravity that pulled you towards corpus linguistics. I think that need to bring data to the questions lures many, myself included, to corpus study. I just found it much more compelling to state that a pattern exists throughout the system rather than expounding on one instance stumbled upon in a text. My uneasiness was in critical discourse studies rather than literature though. I found people making such bold statements about important social issues based on a few limited examples. I wanted to see more.
ReplyDeleteAs for ways of reading texts, check out another reading from Tognini-Bonelli. It's the opening chapter to "Applying english grammar: functional and corpus approaches" (it's in the library). I think there are several chapters in that text that will interest you, e.g. the Hillier chapter that uses corp ling techniques to analyze Hemingway texts. My favorite though is the Goatly chapter; it also connects to your interests.