Beyond expectations: (Applied) corpus linguistics and a framework for the study of spoken professional talk

Abstract

The analysis of real-world, recorded, and transcribed texts (i.e., corpora) of professional, spoken communication in the workplace has been conducted quite successfully through corpus-based approaches (Friginal, 2024). Corpus linguistics is primarily a methodological research approach to the study of language, and specifically, discourse structure, patterns, and use (Biber et al., 2010; Thompson & Friginal, 2020), with corpora serving as datasets of systematically collected, naturally-occurring registers of texts utilized for a variety of purposes. The use of corpora has become a popular approach in the quantitative analysis of the linguistic characteristics of written and spoken language, in general, and sub-registers such as oral communication in the workplace, in particular (Egbert et al., 2022; Staples, 2015). Various findings have pedagogical and, more importantly, language policy applications. This paper focuses on the important contributions of an iterative corpus-based framework to examine linguistic patterning in telephone/telephony-mediated professional discourses so as to obtain novel understandings of how talk is used and construed in these domains. Current limitations, emerging contributions from generative AI applications, and a call to action proposing training and assessment models will be discussed.