PART 4: Conclusion: methodological synergy

So let’s just draw some conclusions from this. First of all, I would argue, and hopefully I manage to convince you by that, that bringing corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics together is a very good idea. There’s a very useful synergy of these two disciplines. Corpus linguistics brings large representative corpora and automatic procedures to help us process the data efficiently. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to the contexts in which variation appears and occurs. And something that we can really learn in corpus linguistics, and we have to pay a lot of attention to.

Variationist sociolinguistics also pays attention to the multivariate nature of linguistic variation and multivariate approaches, statistical approaches to data analysis, which give us an overall picture that actually can tell us much more than any single snapshot of a very complex social reality.

So, hopefully, this gave you some ideas about how to use corpora in sociolinguistic analyses. And there will be more videos to follow in this week to show you how to do this in practise. Thank you very much.