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 Tony McEnery. 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 are the biggest changes that you’ve noticed in corpus research throughout your career?

TONY MCENERY: The increasing dominance of the quantitative, I suppose. So, the turn towards stats but the lack of emphasis on linguistic description annotation.

ROBBIE LOVE: Brilliant. Question two: what is the biggest misconception of corpus linguistics that you’ve encountered?

TONY MCENERY: That one’s easy. Somebody admitted to me at the research councils once the first time they heard about it, they thought we were studying dead bodies because they’d heard ‘corpse linguistics’. So, that’s definitely the biggest misconception ever. There’s nothing to say about dead bodies with corpus data – pretty much apart from representation, perhaps.

ROBBIE LOVE: Brilliant. And finally, this may not be so quick, but how will corpus linguistics make an impact on the world in the future beyond what it already has done?

TONY MCENERY: “Beyond what it already has done”… and what it has done, of course, is substantial. But let me set that to one side and give you a wish – something I wish would happen. I wish that people would get a better sense of how they can use corpus linguistics – call it whatever you want, I’ll call it ‘corpus linguistics’ – in order to better understand and debunk misleading arguments, misleading statements, statements which are harmful to them – they’re prone to believe all of these things. So, in other words, if corpus linguistics can play a role in raising critical awareness within democratic societies, I, for one, would be delighted. People have tried in their work – of course, myself included. But I think Norman Fairclough, maybe at the end of Language and Power, talks about the possible emancipatory effects of the work he was doing, which I thought were unlikely to materialise because the technical nature of what he was doing. But I do believe that corpus linguistics might give people the opportunity just to check some arguments, check ways in which they’re being persuaded, etc. It might be possible that you’d get a better-informed electorate and population, at least in part if some people did that.