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 Pascual Pérez-Paredes. 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 that you’ve noticed in corpus research during your own career?

PASCUAL PÉREZ-PAREDES: I’ll be brief. I suppose one is we’ve become more sophisticated in two different ways. We’ve become more sophisticated in how we interface corpus analysis and corpus linguistics research methods and theory. When I talk about a theory, for example, I’m talking about language learning theory such as usage-based theories. But also, I’m talking about discourse analysis like representation theory. I’ve become interested in Bev Skegg’s personal value theory to look at migration discourses – for example, with my colleague, Elena Remigi. So, that’s one change – we become more sophisticated in how we interface with theories. Also, I think that the overall quality and the standard of our research has, in a way, benefited from increasing sophistication in how we use quantitative methods in our research. But also, we’ve become more sophisticated in trying to tell society about our findings. I suppose this podcast or video cast is a good example of that. So, I think this is something that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

ROBBIE LOVE: Thank you. That’s a good point. What has surprised you the most about your work in corpus linguistics personally?

PASCUAL PÉREZ-PAREDES: Well, I suppose it’s how versatile corpus languages research methods can be and how they have the potential to interest a wide range of scientists or researchers across the board. Last month, I was in the University of Minho in Portugal giving a workshop on using corpus linguistics to research hate speech. It was really interesting to see these linguists and NLP professionals, in a way, just trying to understand how they could benefit from using corpus linguistic methods and looking at things again from a more usage-based perspective. I really believe that corpus linguistic research methods have this affordance – it can be of interest to a very wide range of scientists. To be honest, this has surprised me because back, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years ago probably, I thought of corpus linguistics as a sort of very small area of research that could be of interest to all of us doing corpus linguistics.

ROBBIE LOVE: Finally, looking to the future. How will corpus linguistics continue to make an impact on the world in the future? Where do you think we’re going?

PASCUAL PÉREZ-PAREDES: As I said, I think we are in a position to become sort of relevant actors in a future where, I suppose, digital communication will be dominant. Meaning that most of communication is online and there will be a blend of text and image and sound that can be analysed. I think we are, as I said, in a very good position to be relevant actors there. But I think we also need to increase our understanding of NLP and artificial intelligence such as machine learning – sort of try to understand how we can contribute to this big revolution that is happening right now. I’m thinking about people like Scott Crossley, Kris Kyle. I think they are leading the way in how we can do this. But I think we can also talk about, maybe, our own PhD students. They now come with all sorts of new toolboxes like data mining methods. Some of them know how to program in Python and they make use of R. That’s so refreshing. Of course, all of these can be of interest because we can probably build on the work of people like John Sinclair, Michael Hoey, Tony McEnery, Stefan Gries, and the like. I’m really positive about the impact that we can make in the future – whatever the future. But I think we can interface with this big revolution that is certainly taking place as we speak and which makes use of language but doesn’t look at language and, of course, doesn’t take into account usage in looking at the language. Pretty much, I think we have a role there.