The interface between cultures and corpora: Tracing reflections and manifestations

The ICAME 37 conference, held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in May 2016, had the conference theme of “Corpus Linguistics across Cultures”. Clearly, this was a most timely decision -- cultural studies have grown to become a major sub-discipline in the humanities, and there are also an increasing number of publications and activities that somehow deal with culture and language. But on closer inspection much of this remains fairly abstract and theory-oriented, not primarily interested in looking into language forms and structures as such -- which can be studied with corpus-linguistic methods. The topic of this paper, originally a plenary at the Hong Kong conference, was thus inspired and intrigued by the conference topic. The goal of this paper is to address the issue of the relationship between cultures and corpora in a systematic, principled manner, and to sketch out a framework for research.