In 2023, the Sydney Corpus Lab is pleased to be featuring edited extracts from Dr Robbie Love’s CorpusCast podcast about corpus linguistics. In each blog post published throughout the year, we present the answers of leading corpus linguists to three questions. Specifically, all blog posts present answers to the following two questions:

• What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in corpus research throughout your career?
• How will corpus linguistics make an impact on the world in the future?

Posts from episodes 1-4 additionally present answers to this question:

• What has surprised you the most about your work in corpus linguistics?

Posts from episodes 5 onwards instead present answers to this question:

• What is the biggest misconception of corpus linguistics you have encountered?

This blog post features Elena Semino. We have transcribed the relevant part of the interview but have edited answers for readability (taking out hesitation marks, discourse makers, etc). Interview answers were transcribed by Kelvin Lee from the Sydney Corpus Lab. The full interview can be found here. We are grateful to Robbie Love and Sam Cook for their assistance in creating these posts.

ROBBIE LOVE: What is the biggest change you’ve noticed in corpus research throughout your career?

ELENA SEMINO: It’s definitely the applications outside linguistics. I mean, that’s an easy one, there’s no question about that. There were applications to content analysis in industry early on but the range of areas where corpus linguistics reaches now is phenomenal. So, that is definitely that change. Other people might be able to give an answer more on the technical side but from my experience that has been the biggest change. Of course, the corpora are bigger, the tools are better, but the applications and the fact people know about it outside linguistics too – that’s crucial.

ROBBIE LOVE: Yeah, I agree completely. What has surprised you the most about your own work in corpus linguistics?

ELENA SEMINO: Well, two things, I guess. One is how that training in the linguistic study of literature is actually irrelevant [?] all along. We’re looking at metaphors for 30 years. Now, I use corpus methods and I look at metaphors in relation to pain or cancer or COVID. But actually, in some cases, corpus linguistics enables you to do better and on a larger scale the things you were always interested in. That is definitely the case. The more linguistic communicative type finding that surprised me is… well, there are actually two things: One is wherever I look, there is humour – even if we don’t look for it. There’s lots of humour in the cancer data. The other one is that there’s always conflict as well. Because I look at online data, politeness and impoliteness always come into the picture as well. We usually don’t set out to look for them and then we find humour and conflict, amongst others.

ROBBIE LOVE: Okay, one more: How will corpus linguistics make an impact on the world in the future?

ELENA SEMINO: Well, I think we’re on the way there already because corpora will be larger, they will be more accessible to anyone, they already are. I mean the corpus that you contributed to, when you were at Lancaster, the spoken British National Corpus, is available to people. People will use them more in schools etc. So, I think it has already become kind of an established thing that a lot of people do. I think that is definitely the case. But also, one of the things that happens to me as the director of the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science is that I get approached on a regular basis by different kinds of organisations – especially charities who say “I am concerned about topic x and we have a hunch about how it’s used in the media, whatever, but we want to really know, so can you help us?” So, they come to us. We don’t go looking for them. It’s clear that the method already has currency outside. So, I think, that does contribute to change things and make things better.