Digital linguistics targeting Human Diversity through Contacts
Tauno Nurmela Hall, Main Building
14.15-15.15 Seminar
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Zoom webinar link
This seminar consists of two talks in digital linguistics. First, Nathan Dykes, who will be joining our team in September, presents his current work. The second part presents the previous and ongoing projects in TurkuNLP on multilingual registers, and how we plan to continue and elaborate this in the Centre of Excellence.
Nathan Dykes (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany):
Corpus approaches to operationalising elusive discourse phenomena
Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) uses corpus linguistic approaches to explore how language reflects and constructs social meanings. Over the last two decades, CADS has been increasingly institutionalised, with a growing body of research across geographic areas, topics, and languages.
Despite its popularity, a core methodological challenge persists: the research process is often under-operationalised, and few studies reflect on how methodological decisions shape the linguistic patterns that are found in the corpus. This makes it difficult to compare studies, assess transparency, and build cumulative knowledge across the field.
In this talk, I introduce TILDe (Transparent Interpretation through Linguistic Description), a framework developed in my dissertation that addresses this gap. TILDe is organised around three linguistic levels: lexis, semantics, and lexicogrammar. Each level offers a different entry point into the data, and is paired with a contrast between explorative and targeted analytical strategies. The framework foregrounds how methodological choices influence both what is discovered in the corpus and how findings are interpreted, and it centres researcher subjectivity as a dimension to be made transparent rather than bracketed out.
I illustrate the framework with selected case studies that show how corpus methods surface different kinds of patterns in discourse depending on the entry point chosen.
TurkuNLP Team:
From register variation on the multilingual web to human diversity through contacts – previous, current and future workThis seminar consists of two talks in digital linguistics.
Participation in these seminars allows students to earn credits for HUDI001. Further details can be found on Peppi.