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Transcript Episode 61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 61 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I am here with Kat Gupta. They’re a linguist at the University of Roehampton, and we’re getting enthusiastic about corpus linguistics!

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[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Kat, welcome to the show!

Kat: Hello, Gretchen, thank you very much for having me on here!

Gretchen: Let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests – how did you get into linguistics?

Kat: You can probably tell from my accent that I am from the UK, and I was educated in the UK school system. For our listeners who aren’t in the UK, what this means is that you are able to leave school at 16, having taken a set of subjects and exams, but if you want to continue your education, you need to take a different set of exams or a different set of courses. These are called AS-levels, which are the one-year course, and A-levels, which are the full two-year course. These are much more focused than, say, the US high school system. Most of our students coming to university have between probably three or four full A-levels and maybe one or two AS-levels. It’s a very restricted set of subjects. It means that you have to make some quite hard decisions about what you go on to do. When I was 16, I was absolutely convinced that I wanted to go into biology. As you can see, this didn’t happen.

Gretchen: And yet, you’re a linguist now. How did this come to be?

Kat: Exactly. I took a set of A-levels that were very, very science-y. I was doing biology and chemistry and, initially, physics. What I realised is that I didn’t like this at all, and I wasn’t very good at it either. But happily, for me, what I was doing was English literature. I was doing a weird module called “Critical Thinking.” The teacher of that and I got on quite well. He was like, “Oh, I could probably teach you AS-level philosophy.” The school was like, “We don’t offer this AS-level.” He was like, “Surprise! Now, you do.” Basically, the teaching of this module entailed sitting in the school quad drinking really awful coffee and debating about whether God exists.

Gretchen: What more could you want from philosophy?

Kat: I mean, Plato and Socrates would be so proud of me. The first essay I wrote was in the exam itself. [Laughter] But to my shock, I did well enough that it seemed reasonable to continue this. What I did is I found another sixth form college that were prepared to take me with my extremely messy academic history. They were like, “Okay, what fits in your schedule?” One of the ones that did was English language. I was like, “Okay, this sounds good.” I quite enjoyed this. They called the teacher over. We had a nice chat. She was like, “Yeah, I think you can do the full two-year course in one year.”

Gretchen: So, English language is kind of like linguistics?

Kat: Yes. In the UK, we have a really, really weird system where linguistics seems to get called “English language” certainly at GCSE, which is the pre-16 teaching I talked about, and at A-level. A lot of degrees end up calling their degrees “English Language and Linguistics” to fit into that.

Gretchen: So that people who’ve done English language know that that’s where they should be going.

Kat: So there’s a sense of continuity there. There I was in my first bit of teaching for this subject, and I was simultaneously attending the first-year lessons, which were like, “Here is a noun. This is how we spot a noun phrase,” and also the second-year lessons which were, “Now, do some clause analysis.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] No!

Kat: It was challenging, but it was really fun. I did this, and I thought, “Actually, I wanna keep doing this. This is fascinating. This is enthralling on every level, and I want to do more of it.” But I did hedge my bets a bit. I applied to a degree programme in English language and literature at the University of Liverpool. Basically, after the first year, I was just like, “I don’t want to do any more literature.”

Gretchen: “I am full on in this language thing.”

Kat: Yeah, “I am committing.” How I got into corpus linguistics is that – I didn’t know it when I was applying – but there was this little corpus linguistic powerhouse at Liverpool. There were only three or four people involved in it, but they were super, super involved. They offered a module in the third year that was called “corpus linguistics,” and I noticed it had a cap on. Only about seven people could take this module. I thought, “This sounds weird. I want to do that.”

Gretchen: “I want to be one of the chosen seven.”

Kat: Yeah, “I wanna be one of the chosen seven. I’m going to tough out this module.” Everyone was like, “This is hard.” I was like, “Yes, challenge accepted.” Off I went. Then I started learning about the tools that corpus linguists use and started building my own corpora. I built a tiny baby corpus of music reviews, and then did a little undergraduate project on it. I was just like, “This is great. I love it.” Then they offered an MA in corpus linguistics, and I was like, “Yes, I think I do want to take this,” so did it. I think for that one I looked at literature that was written for children and looked at gender in that. Then it came to thinking about PhDs. I thought, “Well, obviously I want to keep doing this.” Also, when I was 13 or 14, we covered the suffrage movement very, very briefly in history. I was just – there has to be more to this story. It has to be more complicated than these two pages in the textbook. When it came to forming my own research project, it was just, “Right. I’m going to go back and investigate this.”

Gretchen: You were doing this in a corpus way. Maybe we should take a brief moment to talk about what a corpus is, and what people are doing with corpus linguistics. Basically, you have a collection of texts, and then you’re trying to look at what’s in them and figure out what’s going on there? Or is there a better definition?

Kat: Basically, the word “corpus” comes from the word for “body.” We’re talking about this “body” of texts. A corpus can be pretty much any size that you want to think of. At the moment, I’ve worked with corpora that are just 100 texts. I’m working with a corpus that is 1.4 billion words of texts. That’s quite big.

Gretchen: And often they’re on a particular theme.

Kat: Yeah. I mean, the main thing about a corpus is that there’s got to be some principles involved in why you’re looking at these particular texts. Yes, it could be a massive one of everything published in English between 1800 and 2020, which would be a lot of things.

Gretchen: It would be certainly a lot of things.

Kat: Or it can be really, really focused. It could be academic writing by students who have completed one year of a language course. Or it could be academic writing by final year linguistics students.

Gretchen: But you don’t wanna do a pick-and-choose thing where it’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna have this one movie review and this one essay that I wrote when I was 16 and also some emails that I’ve written – just the first three emails I saw.”

Kat: Exactly. You don’t want to have it composed of lots of little bits here and there. There are general corpora available. You can look at something like the British National Corpus or the Corpus of Contemporary American English. What you’ll see is that they’re called “general corpora.” They’re meant to give you this general view of the language. That means that someone has thought very carefully about what ought to be included in an overview of the language. You will get things like magazine articles, newspaper articles, letters, reviews, and so on, but it’s done in a very, very principled way to try and make it representative of lots of language varieties rather than just, “Here’s an essay I wrote,” and “Here’s a film review,” and “Here’s a letter I wrote to my boss,” and “Here’s a letter I wrote to my best friend.”

Gretchen: But you could, for example, if you had an author who’d donated their archives to a museum, you could say, “Okay, here’s a corpus of everything Virginia Woolf has donated to this archive.” That could still be a corpus.

Kat: Absolutely. You could definitely have a corpus that’s based around a single author’s writing. Even then, you’d probably want to make some distinctions. When you come to store the corpus, you probably do want to break it down into what we call “sub-corpora.” These are little bits of a corpus within a corpus. If we wanted a corpus of Virginia Woolf’s writing, we probably want her published work; we probably want her diaries; and we probably want her letters all stored separately.

Gretchen: So you could compare what she’s doing in different ones.

Kat: Yeah. It allows us to do just more with it. We could compare diary entries and letters and see does she write in a similar way when she’s writing something that’s purely for herself versus to other people?

Gretchen: Totally. Okay, you were like, “Corpuses, corpora, they’re the future. I’m really into them.” You’re also gonna do a PhD.

Kat: Yes. One of the nice things about Liverpool is – again, didn’t realise this when I applied – is that one of the programmers of one of the main tools we use was based there – someone called Mike Scott. He developed a programme called “Wordsmith.” You can get it at lexically.net. Basically, he wrote this programme. It’s a specialist corpus programme that is designed to look at patterns in language. It means that we can analyse more texts than we would ever be able to analyse manually. We can stick it in there, and we can let the computer do something it’s very good at.

Gretchen: Which is finding things.

Kat: Which is finding things and counting things. If, for example, we had a copy of your book, and I said, “Okay, now go in there and highlight and count every instance of ‘the,’” what would you do?

Gretchen: Scream and cry, first of all, because this would be a lot of work, and I don’t think I’d wanna do it. Also, I’d probably do a very bad job.

Kat: Totally. You would miss instances. You’d lose count. You’d be like, “Three thousand and twenty – no, was that 3,027 or 3,026?” It would be just a miserable experience. It would be awful. It would take ages, and it would be a waste of your time.

Gretchen: The computer can do that much better than I can. If I have a digital copy of my book, which I do, and I can go in and use the “find” feature and go Ctrl + F – “Find the string T-H-E and show me all of those.” What’s the advantage of using specialised corpora software over just Ctrl + F in a text file?

Kat: Ctrl + F doesn’t really show you the context. What a corpus programme will do is pull out that string of words, let’s say T-H-E, and then it will show these instances in separate lines with some of the words around it. That allows you to look for these bigger patterns and broader patterns across lots of language. We know that “the” is a determiner, that it usually appears in front of some words.

Gretchen: Nouns and adjectives and so on, yeah.

Kat: Yeah. When we look at a lot of it at once, we might be able to see particular patterns. It’s usually used when we’re talking about something that definitely exists, so not something that exists in the abstract. So, “Hand me the bread” rather than “Hand me some bread.”

Gretchen: Gotcha. And it’s sort of a specific quantity or a specific item.

Kat: It’s a specific item. It’s something that definitely exists, and it’s there with you.

Gretchen: And maybe something that’s already been mentioned or something like that.

Kat: Yeah. Computers are super, super good at counting. They’re super, super good at finding and identifying these strings. But they’re not very good at the analysis bit. We don’t want our computer to do the analysis for us. We want to be very aware of the kind of software and the kind of programming that goes into it that give us the results. Because we as humans are fantastically sensitive to language. That’s where the human element comes in. It’s why we don’t just leave it all to the computers to just do as they will with it.

Gretchen: It’s really a lot more of a partnership between the computer showing you some things and the human making meaning out of that.

Kat: Exactly. It’s meant to be a partnership where you play to each other’s strengths. You let the computer do the bit it’s good at, and then you do the bit you’re good at.

Gretchen: The human side also comes in when you’re talking about, okay, how do I decide that this particular set of texts should be the one that I make a corpus of or that I focus on or that I group together compared to the other set of texts.

Kat: Oh, yeah. I mean, there’re so many corpora that you could build that we haven’t even covered yet, that someone could go out there and make a corpus, and it would be something totally unique that someone hasn’t really thought of before. One of the problems is, if the data doesn’t exist in a machine-readable format, we can’t do a lot with it. Something that is digitally native, that is an email, and it was always digital, is much easier to work with. It’s much easier to obtain. However, something like newspapers – well, let’s say, pre-2000, pre-1995 newspapers – super hard to work with.

Gretchen: Because they all have to be digitised.

Kat: They all have to be digitised. They didn’t exist in a digital format. Basically, what you have to do is someone has got to scan each newspaper, and then use something called “optical character recognition” to try and convert the image into text.

Gretchen: More or less accurately.

Kat: More or less accurately. The problem is that newspapers are ephemeral. They were never meant to be hoarded and collected.

Gretchen: They’re on this cheap, thin paper that degrades so fast.

Kat: They’re on this cheap, thin paper that is – if you touch an old newspaper, you’d fear that it’s going to disintegrate in your hands. The text fades. Also, the printing particularly in the early days wasn’t super accurate, so you get all sorts of little ink smudges and blobs. Then the OCR programme has a problem like, “Is this an L, or is this an I?”

Gretchen: Right. So, if you’re trying to search for something –

Kat: Or “Is this an A, or is this an O, or is this an E with a blob on it, or is this actually a B, a D, a P, etc. that’s lost the tail?” It’s kind of a nightmare.

Gretchen: But you’ve done research on historical newspaper corpora anyway.

Kat: Yes, I did. I did my PhD on the media representation of the suffrage movement using newspapers from The Times – between 1908 and 1914. I just had to make my peace with the fact that the OCR was not going to be super, super accurate. On the other hand, I had 7 million words of this in just my suffrage corpora, so not even the main corpus with everything in it, just the stuff that I’d extracted that was somehow mentioning “suffrage” or “suffragists” or “suffragettes.” I had a lot of data there, and so that made me feel a bit more confident that, if I’m seeing something, it’s because it’s there rather than because I want to see it.

Gretchen: It’s still some sort of example of a general trend because you have lots of examples of it.

Kat: Exactly.

Gretchen: What kinds of things did you see in the suffrage corpus?

Kat: Basically, that people were really, really concerned with suffrage direct action. First of all, what I did was read a lot of history. What they tended to work on is stuff produced by suffrage campaigners themselves. They were prolific. You have things like records of meetings. You have meeting minutes. You have their own journals. You have lots of pamphlets. They were writing down their ideas and producing them in pamphlets which could be disseminated. You also had diaries, letters, and other kinds of stuff. They were already working with lots and lots of data, but it was from a particular perspective. What I wanted to find out is how did someone who wasn’t involved in the suffrage movement care about them. If you’re a reader of the Times which was, at the time of this time period, the paper of record, so it’s where people who were influential and often very politically or economically connected read – you’re someone who has no connection with the suffrage movement. You wanna find out about it. You read the Times. What kind of perception do you get from it?

Gretchen: What’s the Times saying? Are they presenting their demands as reasonable or not reasonable? Are they for or against it is a question that comes to mind immediately.

Kat: Yeah, are they broadly supportive or are they broadly hostile? One of the things I found from the historian’s research is that there were lots, and lots, and lots of suffrage societies. It wasn’t that there was one main campaign group. There were about 50. These different groups, you have different aims, who want the votes for different purposes. We see this enormous diversity. It basically covered the entire political spectrum. It covered different regions. There was a group up in the Orkney Islands and groups down in Cornwall, so pretty much the full breadth of the UK. There were groups with international focuses as well. What the Times does is basically flatten all of this. What you do there is see that the time that the campaigners who campaigned through, basically, trying to introduce legislation and trying to get members of parliament to support bills and did petitions and met up with members of parliament and so on, these tended to be known as “suffragists.” Then those who preferred direct action – so things like throwing rocks through windows, sometimes leading huge demonstrations, sometimes doing things like setting fire to boat sheds –

Gretchen: Gosh, okay.

Kat: Yeah. There was a whole arson campaign that doesn’t really get talked about.

Gretchen: Hmm, I wonder why?

Kat: They tended to be known as “suffragettes.” What you find in the Times is that they’re just all “suffragists.”

Gretchen: So, they’re just saying, “We’re not paying attention to the fact that there’re differences between these movements or that they don’t all agree with each other; they don’t all agree with each other’s tactics; they don’t all have the same goals. We’re just gonna lump them all together.”

Kat: Yeah, basically. Here’s this enormous, diverse movement, and we’re just gonna smoosh it all into the same thing and erase all of these very important differences. Then, if you’ve smooshed it all into the same thing, if one part of that group does something that you don’t like, you can blame all of them for it.

Gretchen: Right. So, the people who are setting fire to boat sheds, you can blame them for the people who are meeting with the MPs and trying to lobby behind the scenes and just be like, “Well, they’re all arsonists.”

Kat: What I found is that there was a lot of stuff about direct action. So, lots and lots and lots of stuff about suffrage campaigners disrupting meetings, heckling speakers, as I said, setting fire to boat sheds was a popular one. What I did is I then used corpus techniques here to look at what words were associated, first, with the suffrage terms, found that there were a load of terms associated with direct action, and then looked at those in more detail to work out what kind of actions or what kind of activities they were describing. It ended up being quite useful because different words were used to describe different things. For example, they were quite reluctant to call things “suffrage violence” because that puts a bit too much on it, but then there were things like “suffrage incidents” and “disorder” which seemed a little bit more neutral.

Gretchen: I see. Okay.

Kat: What I found is that there were some terms that were very, very commonly used, and it was mainly because they were vague enough to cover a lot of things.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess that’s still true in the modern day. Like if you’re gonna call something a “riot,” that’s committing to something, whereas if you say, “It’s a march,” well, are you taking sides for against for or against the march? There was just some people marching. Or it was a “protest.” There’re these terms that the media can use to shape public perception of what’s going on.

Kat: And they can make it sound worse than it is as well. Again, I think some of the things that I found you can see today if you look at different protest movements. So, things like Black Lives Matter, there is this spectre of the Black Lives Matter act that’s been created that bears very, very little resemble to who the activists actually are.

Gretchen: It’s also a big, diverse group that has lots of different people’s agendas and lots of different ways of trying to accomplish things.

Kat: Absolutely. It’s a big, diverse movement and, again, that diversity is not necessarily recognised.

Gretchen: So, that was your dissertation – all about suffrage movements. What was the trajectory like to get from there to where you are now?

Kat: As some people probably know, an academic job is pretty hard to come by.

Gretchen: Yes, indeed.

Kat: I spent a lot of time working in one university for a semester, another university for a year, and so on. Basically, what I had to do was diversify my own teaching. As a PhD student or as a PhD scholar, you end up being very, very focused on your particular area of expertise, and you pretty much end up being the world or a leading expert in it.

Gretchen: In this very narrow area.

Kat: It often is a super narrow area. But, unfortunately, unless you’re extremely lucky, most universities don’t have room in their budget to employ someone who can only teach on their super narrow area.

Gretchen: You can’t teach, like, four different courses on corpus linguistics of the early suffrage movement.

Kat: Exactly. I couldn’t teach four different courses on the corpus linguistics of even newspaper texts – even broadening that out a bit. If I was lucky, I could teach a corpus linguistics module. But even then, that would be covering areas of corpus linguistics that I don’t really do a lot of.

Gretchen: And sometimes they might also want you to, say, “Hey, can you just teach morphology or something for us?”

Kat: Which happens. At one point, it was like, “Hey, we’ve employed you to do this course on stylistics,” which is the study of literary texts using linguistic approaches, “Can you also teach history of English?” And I was like, “Sure. Guess I can.” Basically, I ended up kind of like an hourglass where, as an undergraduate, you do a lot of different things, and you gradually narrow your focus until you get to the PhD, and then I had to broaden my focus again and become comfortable teaching in everything to do with language and use, I guess. I did teach a first-year grammar module, which was a bit hair-raising. It was like, “Oh, god, I haven’t done this since I was an undergraduate myself.”

Gretchen: But you do end up with these generalisable research skills where you can be like, “Oh, even if I need to go spend a month brushing up on this, at least I am now good at reading academic texts.”

Kat: Yeah, you end up being very good at being able to identify key texts in an area and then following the literature, basically, so following the citation trail and just going like, “Okay, well, they seem to be drawing on this work, and that looks useful, so I’ll go off and read it.” “Okay, so this work has been used in this way by someone else, and that seems interesting, I’ll go off and read it.” You end up having skills to teach yourself stuff. Also, it’s been really good for my own research because I think we can get a bit too narrow in scope. Suddenly teaching stuff like stylistics and analysing narrative and looking at sociolinguistics and so on has been really informative for my own work. I’m able to bring in these other things.

Gretchen: That’s really fun. I think I definitely through a similar process of becoming more broad when I was leaving grad school and being like, okay, if I’m gonna do general interest pop linguistics, I can be interested in any sub-field of linguistics because I might need to explain it to somebody who’s never heard of it.

Kat: Isn’t it great? It’s so much fun!

Gretchen: You can draw these really fun connections.

Kat: Also, it just all feeds into what you’re doing and what you’re about. It makes you a better linguist if you are familiar with more of these areas.

Gretchen: Do you have another research project that you’re working on at the moment?

Kat: Yeah, basically my co-investigator or partner in crime went to me and said, “Hey, Kat. I’ve just got my hands on 1.4 billion words of online erotica.” And they were like, “Do you want to have a play with this?” And I was like, “Of course!” Because how can you say no to an offer like that, right?

Gretchen: It’s a huge corpus. That is very interesting to analyse and probably not a lot of people have done it.

Kat: It’s, again, one of these texts that people feel kind of like, “Ooo, well, it’s not literary,” or it’s not proper in some way. It’s not a formal text genre. There’s something a bit underworld about it. We were just like, “Yeah, this sounds great.”

Gretchen: I know people who are analysing fanfiction. I guess you could sort of think of this as not that dissimilar of a genre in the sense that it’s open contribution from anybody. People are doing stuff – maybe they’re responding to comments and doing certain things. You probably end up with certain tropes.

Kat: It’s been really interesting going to conferences because other people are doing normal, sensible things like looking at academic writing or looking at novels or looking at general speech, and there we are going like, “Yep, erotica.” But it’s also really interesting to use it as a lens of what do these texts say about human interactions.

Gretchen: What have you found about human interactions?

Kat: I’ve been doing some work on consent because the classics of the more sociolinguistic oriented work – and this is where teaching in that area has been super helpful – is that people say “No” in various complicated ways. If we want to refuse something, it’s a dis-preferred response. That means that it’s not the response that the person who’s asking necessarily wants. That means we usually have to be more elaborate about it.

Gretchen: If I say something like, “Hey, Kat, do you wanna get coffee later?”

Kat: And I couldn’t, I’d be like, “I’m so sorry. I’d love to, but this other thing has come up, and I really have to go to that.”

Gretchen: “Unfortunately, I’m allergic to coffee, and also my parrot needs me at home,” and all of these things.

Kat: Exactly. We feel that we’ve got to give a much fuller explanation.

Gretchen: Whereas if I say, “Do you wanna get coffee?” and you’re like, “Yeah, great. What time?” you can make this very fast, short, affirmative response because that’s the preferred response in that scenario.

Kat: And if you said, “Do wanna go for a coffee?” and I said, “No,” you’d probably feel a bit – pretty bad about that.

Gretchen: “Does Kat hate me?”

Kat: Exactly. These more elaborate responses are a way of smoothing over a social interaction by making our listener feel, “Okay, no, this person does still like you. They just can’t go right now.”

Gretchen: “It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s just that they can’t.” But then even if you don’t want to, you sometimes feel this need to provide a reason why you can’t because, like, if someone invites me for dinner, and I really don’t like them, I might be like, “Oh, no, I can’t. I’ve got something else going on that night,” even if the other thing I have going on is staying home and reading my book because I don’t want them to think I hate them.

Kat: That’s something that we find in discussions of sexual consent, that people are very reluctant to give a “No” where it’s “I don’t want to” because that risks either hurting someone that we care about or potentially, if we’re in a no-so-good situation, exposes us to violence. Generally, we see these nos as being quite elaborate and often about “I can’t do something” rather than “I don’t want to do something.”

Gretchen: Like, “No, I can’t come up to your apartment for a coffee because I’ve got to go home. My parrot will be expecting me” sort of thing.

Kat: Or even, “I don’t want to have sex. I’ve got a headache. I’m feeling really gruff. I just don’t feel up for it.” It’s an “I can’t” rather than “I don’t want to.” One of the things that we’ve seen is stuff to do with use of condoms. In particular, if someone says, “I don’t have a condom,” what are they doing with that?

Gretchen: That could be a way of saying, “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I can’t.”

Kat: Exactly. Basically, if someone’s saying, “I don’t have a condom,” that could be a “Whoops! Love to, just can’t. It’s just not physically possible for me to do this.” We’d expect that to be one of the soft nos. But are people interpreting that as a no?

Gretchen: Right. Or are they interpreting that as, “Oh, it’s okay, I’ll just go down to the corner store and buy one, and then we can proceed.”

Kat: Yeah. One of the things I was interested in is the previous academic work on it which does suggest that people do say no and mean it by saying, “I don’t have a condom,” and that’s just, “I don’t want you to go and find one. I don’t want you pop to the corner shop and buy a pack. I’m trying to say no in a way that isn’t going to hurt you or offend you.”

Gretchen: Right. It’s the same sort of, “Oh, I can’t go for a walk, I don’t have a jacket,” “I don’t have the right shoes,” the sort of, “I lack the necessarily equipment for this activity.

Kat: Or indeed, “Oh, I can’t. I’ve not had enough caffeine today.” It’s a problem I could fix.

Gretchen: You could just have another coffee.

Kat: I don’t wanna fix it though. We’re interested in these texts. What happens when someone says, “I don’t have a condom,” and what happens after that? What kind of actions does it lead to? Basically, this is where I use my corpus programme to look for every instance of the word “condom” in a set of these texts. Computer was really good at this. Gold star computer – it was great. Then I had to read them, and I had to work through a decision tree of possible outcomes and see, basically, what happens. Do you wanna guess what happens?

Gretchen: Well, you know, I think there might be a bit of a confound from the fact that this is something that’s marketed or supposed to be online erotica. If the scene just ends as you would hope that it might end in real life by saying, “Oh, well, okay, maybe next time. Have a nice night,” the person who’s reading this and the particular genre is like – you know, it’s like if you’re reading a mystery novel, and you don’t find out who did it, you’re disappointed.

Kat: Lovely analysis of genre there. [Laughter] What happened is that someone would say, “I don’t have a condom,” and then the other person would fix the problem in some way. Either “That’s fine. I’ve got some,” or “Don’t worry, we can borrow my ex-boyfriend’s,” or “my mom’s,” or “my sister’s.”

Gretchen: I see.

Kat: Or “Don’t worry, I’m an elf under the age of 99, and, therefore, it’s okay. Can’t get pregnant.”

Gretchen: Love a fantasy scenario.

Kat: Honestly, that one was one of my favourites. I think I saved that story just to be like, “They have thought about it, and I appreciate that.”

Gretchen: “Here are some magical elves that don’t get STIs.” Great, great.

Kat: Awesome. Of course, the biggest category was, “Oh, that’s fine. I’m on birth control,” or “That’s fine, let’s just do it anyway.”

Gretchen: Right. Because, again, we have the confounds of the genre.

Kat: We have expectations here. Also, there’s something going on there about – it’s not quite allowed. There’s something a little bit naughty, a little bit –

Gretchen: Taboo about – yeah.

Kat: – risky about that. There’s something, yeah, a bit taboo about that. What we found is that what the sociolinguistics were saying about nos didn’t quite apply to what was happening in these texts. It leads us to a really interesting question about how do people read these texts.

Gretchen: Is this acting out a fantasy that you wouldn’t do in real life which is, okay, it would be risky to not have a condom with a random stranger that you just met or something like that, but if it’s just written as words on a screen, then that’s a way of thinking about that that’s not actually real? Or is this somewhere where people are actually getting the idea that it would be fine to do this in real life?

Kat: Exactly. Does it exist in the world of the texts where, perhaps, some of these rules and boundaries and things don’t exist in the same way? You can have unprotected sex without any consequences, and that’s just how it works in this imaginative world. That’s fine. The problem is – are people reading these as reflections on real life, and are they getting their knowledge from this?

Gretchen: I mean, this sounds like a good question for sex educators.

Kat: That’s the next step of our research project that we want to start talking to sex educators and writers of similar texts and just kind of work out what’s happening when you write these texts – what’s happening when you read these texts. One of the things is that we don’t necessarily expect the writers to have actually experienced the scenarios that they write about.

Gretchen: I mean, I think that the 99-year-old elf is probably unlikely, yes.

Kat: Oh, I don’t know. Who knows? It’s a big, wide world out there. [Laughter]

Gretchen: I haven’t met all of the people in the world. Maybe some of them are elves.

Kat: I mean, I am an empiricist. It’s like, when you write these, are you writing about things you’ve actually done; are you writing about things that you’d like to do but haven’t had the opportunity to do so; or are you writing about things that you find erotic, but if someone said, “I can make that fantasy come true today,” you’d be like, “Oh, no, I don’t actually want to do this”?

Gretchen: Because people do read about a lot of things that are fantastic. I mean, you can read about elves in a non-erotica context as well. You can read about murder mysteries and not wanna be committing murder. There’s lots of things that people do read about that are very much in the realm of the fantastic.

Kat: There’s a whole category on this in our texts that is just about fantasy. There’s another section that is about horror. People have fantasies about aliens and about werewolves and all sorts of things that, if these were actually capable of being carried out, I think we would’ve heard something about the sheer number of aliens and vampires and werewolves roaming the world.

Gretchen: And yet, you can see, if you’re reading about aliens and vampires and werewolves in other genres, and they do the polite fade to black, you might think, “You know what? What if that scene was written about?”

Kat: There’s something about people just having permission to imagine things – sometimes having permission to imagine things that they can’t carry out.

Gretchen: So, we’ll link to your papers that you’ve written about various aspects of corpus linguistics and things like that. Is there anything else you’d like to point people to when it comes to work that you’re interested in?

Kat: There’s a number of people who are doing work on, particularly, queer linguistics that is really, really interesting. One of the things that my co-investigator Alon and I have found really useful is looking at people who are looking at sex advice because it’s kind of the other side of the coin to what we’re doing. We’re looking at how people articulate sexual identities and experiences and desires, and then sex advice columns do something different. They’re kind of like, “What do you want to do? This is how you could go about it.” I particularly like Aimee Bailey’s work on homonormativity in queer women’s media because she started out looking at sex advice columns for queer, bi, and lesbian women’s websites, and then was increasingly interested in, okay, what are they doing about, say, bi women who may have sexual experiences and desires and so on with people of different genders, and how do we make room for these desires and experiences and so on in a community focused on women who have sex with women.

Gretchen: The word “homonormativity” suggests that maybe they’re not making a lot of space for this?

Kat: Yeah. It’s kind of, “How do we establish this homonormativity?” which is not just about sexual behaviours but also cultural identities as well. How do we have this unified queer woman identity that isn’t too troubled by the existence of bisexual women.

Gretchen: That sounds neat.

Kat: It’s really cool stuff. Aimee is a relatively new PhD graduate, and I’m just so interested in what she does next.

Gretchen: Awesome! We’ll link to that as well. Finally, if you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?

Kat: I think you can tell from what I’ve been saying that I am basically all over the place in terms of research interests and experiences and so on. I think that that’s the great joy of linguistics that it lets you explore absolutely anything you want from anthropology to neuroscience. If you want to get into ethnography, there’s so much linguistic work making use of that. If you want to look at how people’s language goes wrong, or how people acquire language, you can get into some really, really scientific areas where you are doing things like MRI scans and things. There’re just so many applications for it. It has applications for everything involving human knowledge that somehow involves communication. I think that’s just so exciting and so magical about linguistics.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, kiki bouba notebooks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. Kat Gupta’s website is mixosaurus.co.uk, and they tweet @mixosaurus.

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Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Kat: Stay lingthusiastic!

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