Corpus Analysis of Online Communication

Abstract

The connectivity of the Internet has created new ways of interacting and facilitated new communicative practices. Online communication is of interest to corpus linguists not only as an ever-expanding domain of language interaction, but also with respect to the particular affordances of networked technologies for corpus construction and accessibility. This entry will offer an overview of how procedures from corpus linguistics, which is characterized by the use of software tools to support the investigation of frequency-based patterns in large-scale datasets, have been applied to map out types of online communication and to document features such as emoji that have become emblematic of such interactions. The steps involved in constructing corpora of online communication are discussed, along with the challenges facing corpus linguists looking to explore emergent forms of online communication