In 2023, the Sydney Corpus Lab featured edited extracts from 12 episodes of Dr Robbie Love’s CorpusCast podcast about corpus linguistics, covering the first year of the podcast (2022). In each blog post published from January to November, we presented the answers of leading corpus linguists to three questions. Specifically, all blog posts presented 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 presented answers to this question:

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

Posts from episode 5 onwards instead presented answers to this question:

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

This final blog post in our series features Monika Bednarek. 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.

Please note that this interview series is now completed, but you can check out the CorpusCast website for additional episodes (from 2023 and beyond) that we weren’t able to cover in this series.

ROBBIE LOVE: What is the biggest change in corpus linguistics that you’ve noticed since the beginning of your career?

MONIKA BEDNAREK: I’d say just the incredible growth together with the diversification into all the different areas of linguistics. For me, that’s the biggest change. I know there are other kind of qualitative changes. But for me, that’s the one that I would pick.

ROBBIE LOVE: Brilliant. Number two – what is the biggest misconception of corpus linguistics you have encountered?

MONIKA BEDNAREK: A few years ago, I was in a meeting and someone referred to corpus linguistics as “oh, isn’t that just Google Ngrams?” So, I guess, for me, that would be the conception that you don’t have to have a very specific kind of training and theoretical and methodological knowhow to do corpus linguistics and also, that it is just about counting or quantitative information, where it does also include qualitative analysis.

ROBBIE LOVE: That’s, I’m finding, quite a common response to that question. Finally and hopefully to end on a rather optimistic note. How do you see corpus linguistics continuing to make an impact on the world in the future?

MONIKA BEDNAREK: I think it actually really depends on how corpus linguistics is going to develop. “The world” is such a big term, right? […] Well, I think it just depends. What languages is corpus linguistics going to be impacting? That’s going to have an impact on how corpus linguistics is going to develop the world. What other disciplines are corpus linguists going to collaborate with? Are there other disciplines more open to corpus linguistics? That’s going to impact on the impact as well. The kinds of collaborations that corpus linguists have and also the institutional support for it. I don’t like to make bold predictions for the future. I think it will continue to have an impact on the world and hopefully, a positive one. But we should just continue to reflect on where else can we go, what directions should we continue to pursue, but also what are the new directions that we should pursue as well.