Mind the gaps: The role of corpus linguistics in researching absences

This paper addresses the charge sometimes made against corpus linguistics that CL cannot deal with absences, that is, information not to be found in a corpus. We begin by examining what absence means in a linguistic sense and distinguish among different varieties of absences, e.g. ‘known absence’ compared with ‘unknown absence’, absence from a sizeable corpus, from a limited set of texts or from a position in a single text, relative absence and absolute absence, and absence defined as ‘hidden from open view’, that is, hidden meaning. We then examine how CL can address each of these kinds of absences. We demonstrate too how certain concepts arising from CL, especially evaluative (semantic) prosody and lexical priming, are extremely relevant to research into absence. Overall, corpus techniques can be invaluable in not only locating absence but in identifying types of absence, in quantifying it and in assisting the researcher to evaluate the relevance of absences.