You are all invited to a talk on language and superdiversity next Tuesday, 30th June. The event is free and there is no need to register, but if
you can let me, Caroline Tagg, know if you plan to come that would be useful ([log in to unmask])
and I can send you directions!
Language and Superdiversity:
exploring corpus approaches
Funded by the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS)
Dr Rachelle Vessey, Newcastle University
“From multilingualism to superdiversity in corpus linguistics: implications for multicultural research”
Tuesday 30th June 2015
2-3:30pm, followed by a break and discussion activity until 5pm
in room 420, Muirhead Tower, University of Birmingham
Corpus linguistics can be described, at least in part, as an approach to the study of ‘authentic’ or ‘naturally-occurring’ language data (McEnery and Wilson, 2001). However, in a globalised society with complex
migration flows and new opportunities for interaction in online spaces, authentic language is increasingly diverse. “Superdiversity” has emerged as a new concept to account for the unprecedented intersections of diverse factors that become meaningful within
a “post-multiculturalism” world of migration and transnational flow (Vertovec, 2010). In linguistics, superdiversity has become an important framework for understanding the complex ways in which new and changing meanings are attributed to languages (e.g. fluency,
literacy, and multilingualism) and linguistic features (e.g. accent, code-switching, spelling) (Blommaert & Rampton 2011). However, corpus work has not engaged with this new theory of society. Although there has been some corpus-based research on language
that is arguably ‘superdiverse’ in that it contains language mixing, play, literacy, and new reliance on language as a communicative resource (e.g. Tagg, 2013; Seidlhofer, 2013), these studies tend not to be directly linked to theories of superdiversity and
therefore corpus linguistic research is not seen as contributing to this burgeoning area of research in the social sciences.
This paper intends to address this gap by overviewing existing corpus linguistic research in areas relevant to superdiversity and exploring how existing corpus approaches can be usefully applied to superdiverse
datasets. Drawing on English, French, and mixed-language Twitter data relevant to the Canadian context, the aim is to highlight the ways in which the field of corpus linguistics can contribute to a better understanding of both superdiversity (as a concept)
and ‘superdiverse’ datasets. For the former, the objective is to use corpus linguistics tools and methods to contribute to greater understanding of superdiversity as a relevant social theory (perhaps replacing ‘multiculturalism’). For the latter, the aim is
to assess the status quo of corpus linguistics tools to tackle language data in their natural, often complexly multilingual state, and, more generally, to assess the potential for corpus linguistics to study not only language(s), but also “languaging” as interactive
and evolving processes.