Searching for Words

Svenja Adolphs, Professor English Langauge and Linguistics at the University of Nottingham

In today’s society, the written word is the most popular form of communication.  We send emails and text messages, connect with our friends through Twitter and Facebook, and even connect to other countries with international news sites.   Not only do we use the written word for instant communication, but also to express our ideas and opinions.  We can find thousands of articles and books with just a click of a button on a database site, linking us to many different options of text.  Text is also essential in the professional world as well, as the world’s businesses, political systems, and economies could not communicate without the written word.

The extreme importance of language in text has now become even more important since the prevalence of the Internet.  In fact, there is so much text on the Internet that we have to find a way to sort it all out.  This is what Svenja Adolphs discusses in her book Introducing Electronic Text Analysis.  Adolphs discusses how we use computers to analyze text and discourse today, and how these methods supplement the traditional ways of analyzing the English language.

Electronic texts are forms of written language on the computer.  They can be anything from an official electronic document, an electronic version of a written book, or an email. New technology allows us to use computers in order to research and analyze these texts and languages. For instance, Adolphs believes that the tools the computer gives us to analyze text and language can be more comprehensive and complete than without.  She gives us the example of how spoken data can be better explained through textual analysis, even though it is one of the greatest challenges: “There is no doubt that the collection of spoken language is far more laborious than the collection of written samples, but the richness of this type of data can make the extra effort worthwhile (26).” Textual analysis is also helpful when it comes to teaching languages, ideology, forensic linguistics, and sociolinguistics, according to Adolphs (9-11).

The different methods of corpus linguistics (or analyzing text) are necessary for research projects.  One of the research projects that Adolphs mentions includes using corpus linguistics to study the use of curse words. As she states:

Electronic text analysis has been used to study the occurrence of gender-related language (Kjellmer 1986, Holmes 1994).  More recently McEnery (2005) has carried out a large-scale corpus-based study of swearing in a number of different discourses. The social variables he considers in relation to bad language range from gender to social class to age, and illustrate the value of electronic text exploration in providing evidence as part of sociolinguistic research. (Adolphs 11)

Popular social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr frequent millions of users each day.

As the Internet has become more widespread and available to the masses, the expression of language has as well.  People are more comfortable with cursing on the Internet than before.  However, there is still a standard on where people can curse.  Through a discussion with a communications class, we found that it is more likely to find people cursing and expressing themselves on sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, blogs, and other personal sites.  These sites promote the use of language in self-expression and people feel comfortable cursing because they are not always liable for what they say.  However, people are hesitant to curse on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and profile pages, as these sites tend to be visited by people who would not appreciate the swear words. In addition, if an author in a news article swore, we would find them less credible for the information.

This is the kind of information that corpus linguistics would help researchers gather.  Like the quote states above, they would collect information about gender, age, and social class as well.  In this example, it is easy to see how text analysis is very helpful to sociolinguistic researchers. Analyzing texts using the methods on the computer gives us insight to language and how people communicate.