Analysing Language, Sex and Age in a Corpus of Patient Feedback

Abstract

This Element explores approaches to locating and examining social identity in corpora with and without the aid of demographic metadata. This is a key concern in corpus-aided studies of language and identity, and this Element sets out to explore the main challenges and affordances associated with either approach and to discern what either approach can (and cannot) show. It describes two case studies which each compare two approaches to social identity variables – sex and age – in a corpus of 14-million words of patient comments about NHS cancer services in England. The first approach utilises demographic tags to group comments according to patients' sex/age while the second involves categorising cases where patients disclose their sex/age in their comments. This Element compares the findings from either approach, with the approaches themselves being critically discussed in terms of their implications for corpus-aided studies of language and identity.

From cross-linguistic to intersectional corpus-assisted discourse studies

“…Finally, the intracategorical approach can involve the manipulation of corpora themselves into different subcorpora (and sub-subcorpora) to try to address a 'kaleidoscope' (Kenny, 2011, cited in Baker, 2023 of different intersections within the data, allowing us to see which patterns come into focus and recede again as others take their place. Alternatively, tagging and annotation can be used to address intersections of sociodemographic identities within a corpus (see discussion Baker and Brookes, 2022).…”

“…Also, intersectionality might offer CADS researchers ways to grapple with poststructuralist approaches to linguistics, including the notions of superdiversity and translanguaging. Given that corpus methods are increasingly taken-up in linguistic studies of social identity (e.g., Baker and Brookes, 2022), the consideration of intersectionality seems especially pertinent. While Baker (2023, p. 10) has questioned the extent to which corpus research -with its initial emphasis on comparing differences through counting -can be compatible with post-structuralist thinking, if CADS is to produce meaningful findings in the field of linguistics, it will need to address the concepts and contexts that are dominating the field, including intersectionality (Levon, 2015).…”

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

“…Fifth, the available metadata may be insufficient to gauge the relevance of contextual factors, such as the age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, or relative social status of individual speakers or authors. If we have enough information to build corpora along such factors, we can frame our research questions accordingly (and ask, for example, how usage varies systematically with age or social class; see Baker and Brookes (2022) for further discussion). More metadata means more potential avenues of research.…”