Community and identity: What can corpora can tell us about academic discourse?

Abstract

To many outsiders, corpus linguistics is often seen as a dreary quantitative method for sad IT geeks, but I want to argue here that it can contribute to our understanding of two of the most controversial concepts in the social sciences: community and identity. With the emergence of community-oriented views of literacy in recent years, greater attention has been given to the specific contexts of language use, so we have learnt that texts are successful only when they employ conventions that other members of the community find familiar and convincing. Because of this, corpus studies have become invaluable in revealing how language choices help construct both arguments and disciplines. Moreover, because writers negotiate representations of themselves through the discourses of their communities, corpus studies also contribute to a new way of conceptualising identity. Essentially, the study of academic discourse shows how we choose our words to connect with others and present ideas in ways that make most sense to them. By privileging certain ways of making meanings, repeated uses of language help to perpetuate the norms and thinking of disciplinary communities and so encourage the performance of certain kinds of professional identities. Communities thus constrain identity choices but they also indicate the ways we relate independent beliefs to shared experience. In this way, the production of texts is always the production of community and of self.