Investigating digital sex talk practices: A reflection on corpus-assisted discourse analysis

Corpus-assisted discourse analysis is an approach that is used either on its own or in support of other forms of discourse analysis. It takes lexical markers as its focus, deploying computer software to count and compare these markers in order to learn more about the discourses of which they are a part. Word categorisation in corpus study is often done using tagging software which automatically goes through the corpus and ‘tags’ the lexical items based on semantic categories. Corpus linguistic research certainly has its own established ethical codes, but there tend to be different sets of criteria applied to already published written documents versus transcribed samples of spoken discourse. The corpus-assisted investigation of practices is an important step towards even more fine-grained discourse analysis in which discourse in use can be analysed. Closer examination of the transcripts would perhaps reveal explanations for this difference.