Aspects of computer-mediated communication for research in corpus linguistics

This paper suggests that an important frontier for corpus linguistics to reach is the ability to handle more precisely the discourse of imagined/virtual/on-line communities on the World Wide Web and their attendant linguistic expressions. Computer-mediated communication, exemplified by the Internet Relay Chat/‘I Seek You’ genre, brings the global world together every day and has proved to be immensely popular. Such types of discourse present a challenge to corpus linguistics, whose agenda should then include refining appropriate computational tools, and linguistic theories, in order to provide a more thorough investigation of such new linguistic patterns. This paper examines aspects of this agenda to measure new electronic textualities within the paradigm of corpus linguistics. It compares the ability of two well-known corpus taggers to handle such texts, and discusses some of the lexicogrammatical patterns that emerge from an Internet Relay Chat corpus.