Taming Textual Data: The Contribution of Corpus Linguistics to Computer-Aided Text Analysis

Corpus linguistics studies real-life language use on the basis of a text corpus, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques. This article seeks to bridge the gap between the social sciences and linguistics by introducing the techniques of corpus linguistics to the field of computer-aided text analysis. The article first discusses the differences between corpus linguistics and computer-aided text analysis, which is divided into computer-aided content analysis and computer-aided interpretive textual analysis. It then outlines the techniques of corpus linguistics for exploring textual data. In an exemplary analysis of letters to shareholders, the article demonstrates how these techniques can be applied to compare letters to shareholders from two different years. The article concludes with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of corpus linguistics for management and organization studies.