Myth-busting corpus linguistics for heritage language research

• Olesya Kisselev, Ph.D., University of South Carolina
• Naomi Nagy, Ph.D., University of Toronto
• Stefanie Wulff, Ph.D., University of Florida

Considering the intersection of heritage language studies and corpus linguistics as a research focus, we will address several widely-accepted myths about what is and is not possible. Following a brief introduction to the field of corpus linguistics, and then using examples from our research and that of others, aiming to include less-frequently-studied heritage languages, we will consider myths such as:

• Corpus data can’t tell us about individual speakers or social factors.
• Corpus data don’t allow for consideration of negative evidence.
• Corpus linguistics is too simplistic – it’s number-crunching, not linguistics.
• Corpus linguistics is too difficult for non-specialists.
• Corpora don’t exist for my language.
• Corpus linguistics isn’t feasible for the very small and/or underdocumented language that I study.

By busting these myths, we will show that corpus linguistics has a great potential for the study of heritage languages and can be useful in answering a wide range of research questions. A useful resource for methods and tools is Nagy (in press).

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