61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks  about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people  have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people are  very specific, but what if you’ve got, say, “everything published in  English between 1800 and 2000″ and you’re trying to figure out how the  use of a particular word (say, “the”) has been changing? In that case,  you might want to turn to some of the text analysis tools of corpus  linguistics – the area of linguistics that makes and analyzes corpora,  aka collections of texts.

In this episode, your host Gretchen  McCulloch gets enthusiastic about corpus linguistics with Dr Kat Gupta, a  lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of  Roehampton in London, UK. We talk about how Kat’s interests changed  along their path in linguistics, what to think about when pulling  together a bunch of texts to analyze, and two of Kat’s cool research  projects – one using a corpus of newspaper articles to analyze how  people perceived the various groups within the suffrage movement, and  one about what we can learn about consent from their 1.4 billion-word  corpus of online erotica.

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Links to everything in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/665693903339536384/episode-61-corpus-linguistics-and-consent