Conspicuous by absence? Analysing the absent in corpus/discourse studies
Charlotte Taylor
University of Sussex
According to Baker (2006: 183) 'presence tends to take precedence over absence in a corpus, because we often may not know what is missing'. This in turn may lead to skewed and potentially misleading picture of the discourse under analysis. In this paper, I address the issue of absence and attempt to group and identify some ways through which we can identify what is not in the corpus when combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. I start by surveying some problems with absence, and then go on to collate previous research and present a kind of toolkit of possible techniques for identifying the absent. These resources fall into four main groups: those which start with corpus linguistic methodologies such as the use of key words; those which start from a discourse analytic perspective such as the use of frames; those which employ non-linguistic contextual data, in this case population statistics; and, finally, the use of introspection.