Investigating Englishes with Corpora: Variation, Contact, Translation

Corpus linguistics has proved especially apt at investigating socially-conditioned and contextually-bound language use, through empirical analyses based of multiple texts collected from many speakers. By providing data and methods for the empirical investigation of parameters of variation, corpus linguistics has contributed to improving our understanding of the ways in which languages, and their functional varieties, are used in situated communication. For English, this global “speech community” has in recent years grown to include the billions of bi- and multilingual people worldwide who use English for cross-cultural communication in international settings. Further avenues for corpus-based research have thus opened up, including research on learner English and English as a Lingua Franca. It is now becoming increasingly clear that corpus studies of contact language varieties are essential to understand both synchronic variation and diachronic change. While language contact is traditionally associated with bilingualism and second or foreign language production, the hypothesis has been put forward that translation, too, should be construed as a locus of language contact, albeit one of a rather subtle kind. Against this background, this issue of Textus focuses on corpus approaches to the analysis of variation in English, taking stock of recent theorization, empirical insights and methodological advancements. It brings together studies addressing “traditional” dimensions of variation (diaphasic, diastratic, diatopic and diachronic), and studies of contact language varieties (such as learner language, ELF, translation and interpreting).