#corpus-linguistics — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #corpus-linguistics, aggregated by home.social.
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Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a small conference on corpus linguistics and AI organised by colleagues from English and German linguistics at the University of Gießen. I am grateful to my co-author @mshakir_Dr for suggesting that we present our work there as I wouldn't have applied otherwise and to the organisers for allowing different perspectives and opinions to be heard. The format allowed for lots of time to discuss our diverging views in a stunning setting.
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The CfP for our DN35 Conference ”Mapping and Countering Authoritarian Discourses“ in Opole, Poland, 25–26 February 2027, is now open.
During DN35, we want to reflect on (neo)authoritarianism today, its role in public discourse, and its impact on contemporary politics. We want to map the discursive construction of the (neo)authoritarian appeal across the Global North and South, and the ways in which they can be counteracted. We welcome a wide range of methodologies and approaches to researching these issues, including critical political, psychological, and post-structuralist #DiscourseAnalysis, #CorpusLinguistics, and #RhetoricalAnalysis.
For all relevant information see: https://discourseanalysis.net/DN35
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Does anyone know when and where the CL2027 (Corpus Linguistics 2027) conference is planned? Duckduckgo is not helping me and I want to avoid a clash of conferences!
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Another freaking f-word
I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1
Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve VanceOrigins and use
The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:
“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.
The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):
“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”
That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:
Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2
Frequency of “freaking” in different genres. Graph from COCA.As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”
Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.
WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.
Data
Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:
Frequency of “freaking” in five-year segments from 1990 to 2019.That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:
Frequency of “freaking” in 20 countries where English is spoken (GloWbE, 2012–2013).Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:
Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.
Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?
Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:
Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.
This album is the OED’s first citation for intransitive “freak out” in the sense “renounce societal norms, esp. by embracing pacifism, rejecting conservative values, and adopting a nonconformist appearance”.Pragmatics
Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.
What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:
Comic written by Steve Niles and drawn by Ben TemplesmithA little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:
Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:
. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4
Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.
In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:
. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.
We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.
Tyrese Gibson in Fast Five (2011)*
1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).
2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.
3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.
4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.
#censorship #comics #corpusLinguistics #euphemisms #expletiveInfixation #freakOut #freaking #fuck #fucking #infixation #intensifiers #mincedOaths #phrases #popCulture #slang #swearing
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📘 New publication!
Our members @agnieszkagegotek and @dominikgegotek have published a book chapter on analysing values, emotions, and sentiment in text. Focusing on EmoTagger, the study highlights challenges with complex language.
#corpuslinguistics #researchtools #research🔗 https://digespedi.us.edu.pl/index.php/2025/11/30/new-publication/
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Nice to finally see this in print!
New book chapter:
'Leuk: A little word (in Dutch) with great meaning.'
Available from:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-81681-9_11
Wat een leuke verrassing!
#CorpusLinguistics #semantics #NSM
#linguistics #humanities -
I don't think I've heard anyone say this before, so:
The plural of anecdote is not data ... except under very particular circumstances in #corpusLinguistics !
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Corpora & Discourse Conference 2026: A reminder that the deadline for abstracts is coming up, on 16 November!
More info on BlueSky or the conference website: https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cad-2026/Source:
https://bsky.app/profile/corporadiscourse.bsky.social/post/3m52aijonnk2z -
We did it!
On the fifth application round, we finally got a grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, VR)! For the coming three years, @klasronnback , @ljo and me will collaborate to bring the voices of former US slaves to today's audiences through corpus linguistics and NLP tools. We'll keep you posted!
#CorpusLinguistics
#histodon
#academicchatter
#VR -
I taught a #CorpusLinguistics workshop for colleagues and #PhD students today and one participant turned up with a house plant, prominently placing it on the table among the laptops and coffee cups. It was a lovely sight and greatly improved the room ambiance! 🌱 #BringYourOwnPlant
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@corpuslinguistics
The next Corpus Linguistics conference will take place during Easter 2027 in Hong Kong at HK Poly U. In summer 2029 it returns to Europe when @michamahlberg.bsky.social will host CL at Erlangen.
#CADS
#CorpusLinguistics
@DiscourseNet
@linguistics -
The words humans use to describe nature are perfectly healthy. Some guy read way too much into some Google Ngram graphs showing a decline in the frequency of 28 words that he chose, since *the Romantic period.*
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-words-humans-use-to-describe-nature-are-vanishing-study-finds
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My postdoc at the American Philosophical Society is coming to an end. I’m still figuring out where I’m off to next, but if you have any #linguistics job leads (academic, alt-ac, or industry) that might befit someone with experience in #LanguageRevitalization, #HistoricalLinguistics, and #CorpusLinguistics, please let me know!
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First presenter at the LxGr 2025 Symposium today
(9:30am BST, 6:30pm AEST for me).
In case you'd be interested in the topics, the PPT slides will be made available soon. #CorpusLinguistics #linguistics Programme: sites.edgehill.ac.uk/lxgr/ -
Github repo for enriched COHA fiction metadata: github.com/suomela/coha... Presentation slides: tinyurl.com/cohagpt #ICAME46 #corpuslinguistics #corpusresources
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pkfbbsaiymu63zrfhi42r3lj/post/3lrzwzvfhac2z
icame46_saily_et_al_2025 -
There is nothing like a fitting corpus example to light up one's day, so here we go: "After hearing all of that, I'm tireder than I thought I was."
Simultaneously one of nine sentences containing "tireder" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English aka COCA and a good description of my state of mind :)
(And yes, of course "more tired" is overall just a bit more frequent, with 301 occurrences)
#corpusLinguistics #English #inflectionalMorphology -
🆕 CADSbib annotated bibliography 👩💻 Do you work with corpora & discourse? 📚 500+ references annotated with corpora, language, tools, methods & more. 🔗 nfdykes.github.io/blog/2025/ca... #CADS #DiscourseAnalysis #CorpusLinguistics #DH
CADSbib. An annotated bibliog... -
Anyone doing research on digital religion?
I've just finished writing a draft on religious influencers and am looking for suitable journals.
My research method combines computational statistical tools and discourse analysis.
#CorpusLinguistics #Discourse #Linguistics -
New paper: 'Appraising feedback stance in higher education: A corpus-assisted discourse study of student and academic perceptions, perspectives and preferences'
Includes corpora, Python script and interactive graphs 🙂
#CorpusLinguistics #Linguistics #education
See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41701-025-00196-3 -
The programme for LxGr2025
(Edge Hill University, UK) is now available. Registration is free!
This is a virtual Symposium.
#CorpusLinguistics #Linguistics #grammar
https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/lxgr/ -
How frequent is vulgar language in online discourse across 20 different English-speaking regions?
Corpus linguistics has the answer. Image and paper by Schweinberger & Burridge, 2025: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946
#swearing #profanity #language #linguistics #CorpusLinguistics #research #EnglishLanguage #vulgarity
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New release of nzilbb-labbcat #Python package 0.11.0
https://pypi.org/project/nzilbb-labbcat/0.11.0/Including a new upload API, and support for accessing non-textual annotation data, e.g. images of automatically annotated video frames.
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New release of nzilbb.labbcat #RStats package 1.4-0
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/nzilbb.labbcat/Including functions for managing media files, a new upload API,
and support for within-word segment context matching. -
Is #rationality a normative or descriptive concept?
Kevin Reuter, Lucien Baumgartner, Michael Messerli "present the findings of a #corpusLinguistics study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative."