#RC21 Valentin Werner: Using concordances in pop cultural linguistics

Join us for the RC21 Project Symposium, where invited speakers and project team members will present their work on methodology and applications of concordance analysis!

Valentin Werner: »Using concordances in pop cultural linguistics«

Abstract:
Pop cultural linguistics (Werner 2022) is an emerging subfield of linguistics concerned with the study of performed language, that is, the (largely) scripted and fictional language used in various artifacts with a commercial, entertainment-based purpose (such as songs, movies, TV series, comics, etc.). This talk has two objectives: First, it highlights some of the general challenges when working with such material, for example in terms of data availability, corpus compilation and data processing (e.g. dealing with spelling variants). Second, it illustrates how reading concordances has informed pertinent studies. Specifically, it demonstrates how concordance analysis has been employed in the study of telecinematic language and of pop song lyrics, using both publicly available online corpora (such as the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus; Davies 2021), as well as self-compiled corpora explored with the help of standalone tools (e.g. Werner 2021; Karpenko-Seccombe 2023). Overall, it posits that concordance analysis is an indispensable component of the research toolkit in the domain of pop cultural linguistics for at least three reasons: (i) It allows both quantitative and qualitative descriptive insights into synchronic and diachronic pop cultural data, (ii) it can be fruitfully combined with further corpus techniques (n-gram and keyword as well as multi-dimensional analysis), and (iii) it has a substantial practical dimension, potentially informing language education/applied linguistics.

References:

Davies, Mark. 2021. The TV and Movies corpora: Design, construction, and use. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 26(1), 10–37.

Karpenko-Seccombe, Tatyana. 2023. Communicative and linguistic features of reality show interactions: A case study of Love Island UK. In Christoph Schubert & Valentin Werner (eds.), Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture, 59–88. London: Routledge.

Werner, Valentin. 2021. Catchy and conversational? A register analysis of pop lyrics. Corpora 16(2), 237–270.

Werner, Valentin. 2022. Pop cultural linguistics. In Mark Aronoff (ed.), The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.