1) The document discusses using blogs and other structured web data to develop linguistic corpora for research. It argues that structured web data provides large amounts of naturally occurring language data in various genres and languages. 2) Examples are given of how blog data in particular is well-structured with metadata like authorship, dates, and semantics. This structured data can be extracted and analyzed to study linguistic patterns and variation across different authors, registers, and languages. 3) One research example analyzed the distribution of future tense expressions ("will" vs. "be going to") in three English language blogs and found patterns relating to subject type that confirm theoretical assumptions.

1. Corpora, Blogs and Linguistic Variation: Arguments for Using Structured Web Data in Corpus Development Cornelius Puschmann University of Düsseldorf [email_address] University of Paderborn 8 November 2007

3. What counts as evidence in linguistics?

5. Different schools of thought ...all have different questions and assumptions! CogSci SocioLing Functionalism

7. System, use and the individual

8. A totalizing view of language production investigation but... whose system? whose use? system social function cognitive mechanism genetic disposition use cultural transmission

9. Margin vs. center: what is shared vs. what varies If we're interested in variation, corpus analysis is the way to go shared, recurring & patterned language individual & varying language

11. Using the Web for corpus investigations

17. Things to consider ...not a whole lot of language data!

18. Things to consider ... better, but we need to take register into account

22. An example

23. A research example

25. Distribution of will vs. be going to in three blogs light blue = will dark blue = going to

29. Thanks for listening!

30. Corpora, Blogs and Linguistic Variation: Arguments for Using Structured Web Data in Corpus Development Cornelius Puschmann University of Düsseldorf [email_address] University of Paderborn 8 November 2007