Computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media corpora: Introduction

This issue brings together language-centered studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media corpora. They are illustrative of contemporary research interests in a very extensive research field that has strongly evolved over the past two decades: In the early days of CMC, much of the research was quite “anecdotal and speculative, rather than empirically grounded” (Herring 2004: 338) and in language-focused studies there was a predominant interest in the detection and description of prototypical features of the new genres (e. g. Crystal 2001). It took some time before the social and contextual embedding of these features and of CMC discourse in general was operationalized systematically as part of the research design. Androutsopoulos (2006: 430) discussed the reductive focus on the idiosyncrasies of the genre and argued that the time was ripe for “a user and community-centered approach, which is promising for a more complex theorizing of the social and contextual diversity of language use on the internet.” Since then the field hasmatured. CMC research has not onlywitnessed a boost, it got firmly embedded in linguistic disciplines like sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and obviously computational linguistics. Furthermore, the