1The aim of this tutorial was to demonstrate the potential of linguistic corpora and corpus analysis techniques for the analysis of socio-cultural phenomena and trends observed through language use in specialized discourse. We have shown how methods of corpus linguistics enable quantitative as well as qualitative observations that go beyond the researcher’s intuition, and thus offer greater transparency, objectivity, reliability and replicability, which are also becoming increasingly important in data-driven humanities and social science research.

2The contribution of this tutorial is three-fold. First, we have demonstrated the importance of understanding the content and structure of a research dataset in order to be able to maximize its potential for our research. Second, we have showcased how a set of standard corpus analysis techniques can be utilized well beyond quantification only and simple corpus queries. Instead, we have systematically used the output provided by the concordancer as a starting point for a detailed qualitative manual analysis that carefully situates the results in the relevant socio-linguistic context. Last but not least, we have situated the tutorial in a real-life research setting, demonstrating the application of common corpus analysis techniques to tackle a set of trending research questions in humanities and social science research.

3While the tutorial is based on the corpus of Slovenian parliamentary debates, students and scholars are strongly encouraged to replicate the analyses using parliamentary corpora for other languages, thereby contributing to the multilingual, trans-national and trans-cultural comparative research on parliamentary discourse.