This call for papers is for a panel to be held at the 24th Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference (28-30 April 2017, Nottingham, UK). Apologies for any crossposting.
Call for Papers: Corpus Linguistics in Language and Sexuality Studies
Corpus linguistic work on sexuality has been carried out for more than a decade. This panel aims to collate recent corpus linguistic research on sexuality to take stock of how this field has developed and to explore potential future developments. As a methodology, corpus linguistics has considerably improved our understanding of how the usage frequency of linguistic features is involved in the discursive construction of sexuality, be it from a sociolinguistic or a (critical) discourse analytic perspective. The panel organiser invites paper proposals that build on this tradition and advance corpus linguistic sexuality studies through theoretical or methodological considerations based on new corpus analyses. In particular, work that addresses the following questions will be preferred:
What does the frequency of linguistic features tell us about the discursive construction of sexuality?
How should high-frequency, low-frequency and absent features in corpora be treated in sexuality-related linguistic analyses?
How can qualitative corpus linguistic techniques fruitfully be used in language and sexuality studies to complement quantitative corpus analyses?
Which role can corpus linguistics play in the triangulation of methods in language and sexuality studies (for example, with ethnographic approaches)?
In how far are lexical, semantic and grammatical linguistic levels involved in the discursive construction of sexuality and how can these levels be adequately studied through corpora?
Which specific aspects of the discursive construction of sexuality do analyses of frequency lists, keyness, concordances, collocations, colligations and other corpus linguistic techniques target?
How can corpus linguistics be employed to uncover sexuality-related discourses such as heteronormativity, homonormativity, gender binarism, homophobia and heterosexism?
How can corpus linguistics contribute to Queer Linguistic research goals such as the deconstruction or de-essentialisation of gender- and sexuality-related categories?
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words (excluding references) by 10 September 2016 to Heiko Motschenbacher (Goethe-University Frankfurt): motschenbacher@em.uni-frankfurt.de .
Best regards,
Heiko Motschenbacher (panel organiser)