AAAL 2027: Invited Colloquium
Convened by Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan
Interdisciplinary Applied Corpus Linguistics: Practicalities, Outcomes, and Opportunities AAAL Strand: Corpus Linguistics (COR)
Convener:
Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan Texas A&M – Corpus Christi
Shannon.Fitzsimmons-Doolan@tamucc.edu
Discussant:
Eric Friginal, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
eric.friginal@polyu.edu.hk
Colloquium Abstract
The need for sound interdisciplinary scholarship to address complex challenges such as climate change or public health is widely supported. Furthermore, empirical observation of language data used in real world and non-linguistic disciplines can inform many aspects of complex problems. For example, as Finke (2018, p. 408) comments, “language and language use are an integral part of all science.” Even more to the point, language and language use are an integral part of all scholarship. Yet, apart from fields that have long been associated with applied linguistics, the potential for integration of applied linguistics to the interdisciplinary study of complex problems is generally underrecognized.
Corpus linguistics investigates patterns in large, purposefully designed samples of digitized natural language quantitatively and qualitatively through software or computer programming (Biber & Reppen, 2015). As this subfield has developed, applied corpus linguistics, which addresses applied research questions, has been recently established. Research which includes collaborators from outside of linguistics and meets other criteria of rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship is a promising natural outgrowth of both the development of interdisciplinarity generally and applied corpus linguistics more specifically. In recent years, a growing number of applied corpus linguists have been partnering across disciplines to address complex sociopolitical problems in science, health care, and more.
This colloquium highlights multiple interdisciplinary applied corpus linguistics partnerships including collaborations with scholars in the disciplines of climate change, computer science, digital humanities, education, law, healthcare, and technology. The presentations will share interdisciplinary applied corpus linguistics studies as well as insight into the practicalities of supporting these relatively unconventional research structures. A culminating discussion will synthesize the presentations and address the future of interdisciplinary applied corpus linguistics. The practical discussion throughout the colloquium will appeal to applied linguists specializing in other methodological approaches and interested in interdisciplinary collaboration.
Mapping Interdisciplinary Applied Corpus Linguistics Partnerships Across Academia
Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
shannon.fitzsimmons-doolan@tamucc.edu
As applied corpus linguists have begun to collaborate with scholars from additional disciplines, little is known about the amount, scope, and nature of that type of work. In part, this is because publication of interdisciplinary scholarship is disseminated across all fields (i.e., in no central location), the work is relatively recent, and no community of scholars unites this fragmented program. This presentation will address this research gap by reporting a systematic survey of published interdisciplinary applied corpus linguistics literature across disciplines.
Using the Web of Science database as well as ad hoc outreach efforts, the presenter identified studies conducted by a corpus linguist and a scholar trained in a non-linguistic discipline. The presentation will share the results of this survey including the distribution of (1) collaborating disciplines, (2) journal type (i.e., linguistic, non-linguistic, interdisciplinary), (3) citation information, and (4) publication date. The results will inform scholars interested in pursuing interdisciplinary collaborations by revealing established as well as unexplored collaboration opportunities and successful publication practices. The presentation will demonstrate “how work in applied linguistics generates knowledge about the intersection of language with a broad spectrum of experiences and has the potential to inform policy, practice, and public understanding across individual, community, and societal scales” (AAAL, 2026) and will lay the foundation for the subsequent papers in this colloquium.
Why Law Needs Linguists, Why Linguists Should Care, and How to Get Involved
Brett Hashimoto, Brigham Young University
brett_hashimoto@byu.edu
Basically, law is language. Virtually every aspect of the field from encoding ordinances to debating bills to issuing warrants to prosecuting suspects is conducted and mediated via language. Also, legal language is confusing and difficult. At the same time, it is also incredibly consequential as constitutions, statutes, contracts, etc. govern what people can and cannot do and describe the consequences for violating what these legal documents outline. As such, legal language presents opportunities for and barriers to justice, equality, and effective governance, which applied linguistics is uniquely positioned to address. This presentation synthesizes my research program demonstrating how linguistic analysis can illuminate, and ultimately ease, the burdens imposed by "legalese." I demonstrate how I have and how other applied linguists could do this in at least three ways: (1) conducting linguistic analysis into describing the nature of legal language and legal procedure, (2) helping to improve the production of legal language, and (3) helping jurists to understand legal language. I, then, describe the nature of the different collaborations that I have had with legal professionals, including research into developing a citizenship clinic, creating a ESP curriculum for preparing for a masters of law program, developing a contracts word list, organizing conferences on law and linguistics, training judges and lawyers on linguistics and the use of linguistic tools, analysis of search warrant procedure, and predicting trial outcomes based on linguistic variables. Finally, I discuss practical issues related to collaboration with lawyers, judges, and legal academics. Specifically, I describe how I entered into these various collaborations, how my work has been supported, practical advantages of working on legal linguistic issues, challenges that I have faced, and how I overcame these challenges. This presentation, then, proposes several ways in which interested applied linguists can begin a research program that involves legal linguistic research.
Corpus Linguistics for Digital Humanities and Computer Science
Marianna Gracheva University of Turku
marianna.grachova@fau.de
Registers are culturally recognized varieties of texts, associated with the situation of use (e.g., research articles, news reports, conversations; Biber, 1988). The text-linguistic register paradigm has demonstrated systematic functional links between communicative and linguistic characteristics of register texts through applied research across disciplinary and professional domains: second language education (Biber et al., 2011), academic writing development across levels and disciplines (Staples et al., 2016), specialized service domains, such as the work of call center executives (Friginal, 2009), scientific study of literature (Egbert & Mahlberg, 2020), medical (Staples, 2014), legal (Wood, 2023), and digital (Biber & Egbert, 2018) discourse, AI language (Berber Sardinha, 2024), and LLM training (Myntti et al., 2025), illustrating the major role of register in communication.
This talk first presents an overview of four new interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of linguistics and soft (literary studies and art history/museology) as well as hard sciences (computer science), informed by the register framework, including investigations of: a) audience group fluidity, with a focus on children’s and adult fiction in literary studies; b) effects of digitization in art communication, with a focus on the digital versus analogue modes in the register of art descriptions; c) large language models’ capabilities in producing human-like register-specific language; and, most recently, d) hybridization patterns in online public discourses on the unrestricted web in order to inform LLM training and web register classification tasks. Particular attention is then devoted to the last of these efforts—a collaboration with TurkuNLP—with a focus on the role of machine learning (ML) in data curation (e.g., data retrieval, automatic classification, annotation), the ML goal of enhanced register classification based on linguistic information and implications for search engines, and, the linguistic analyses that aid this ML goal. Lastly, we discuss practical aspects of and prospective avenues for interdisciplinary collaborations.
Applying corpus linguistics within and beyond the academy
Gavin Brookes Lancaster University (UK)
g.brookes@lancaster.ac.uk
Niall Curry University of Birmingham (UK)
n.curry@bham.ac.uk
As a field, Applied Linguistics embodies a complex of epistemologies that shape how knowledge of language is made, validated, shared, and understood (Curry et al. 2025). However, linguistics is not the only domain concerned with language. Language serves as data and evidence in many fields of study, as well as across various areas of professional practice. This relevance of language and language data accordingly positions Applied Linguistics to make strong contributions to many facets of research and, more broadly, to everyday life. Yet, for such applications to be realised, due consideration must be given to how principles in Applied Linguistics are recontextualised – and in that process, even reimagined – as our research moves beyond its local disciplinary boundaries. To this end, in this talk, we address the interdisciplinary nature of Applied Linguistics and the relevance of the field across and beyond the academy. We do so by shedding light on these processes of recontextualisation and reimagination through a reflection on applied corpus linguistics and its relevance across domains with which our own work has engaged, such as technology, education, climate change, and healthcare (e.g., Brookes et al. 2018; Curry et al. 2026). Specifically, we spotlight our roles in repackaging corpus linguistics for different audiences and we signal key lessons learned while engaging in such practices. In so doing, we offer critical reflections on our own practices, and on the very nature of ‘impact’, gesturing to guidance for researchers wishing to move their work in corpus linguistics across the academy and, indeed, beyond it.