Language, sexuality and corpus linguistics

In this paper I discuss the potential that corpus linguistics approaches have to make in terms of enabling research on language and sexuality. After giving some background relating to my involvement in the development of this approach and discussion of some of the benefits of using corpus linguistics, I then outline some potential areas for concern, including: misconceptions of the field as only quantitative, the danger of reading only concordance lines, over-reliance on the idea of removing bias, the tendency of corpus approaches to focus on difference or easily searchable features and issues with copyright and ethics. I then discuss potential future directions that the approach could take, focussing on work in non-western and non-English contexts, the development of new tools such as Lancsbox, and the integration of multimodal analyses, using examples from my own work and others.