METALANGCORP: PRESENTING THE FIRST CORPUS OF MEDIA METALANGUAGE IN SLOVENE, CROATIAN AND SERBIAN, AND ITS CROSS-DISCIPLINE APPLICABILITY

Abstract

Growing interest in meta-language, in linguistics and other disciplines, has highlighted a gap in metalanguage corpora and analytical resources, which remain among the scarcest in corpus-linguistic developments so far. This paper is aimed at making a step towards filling this gap, both by presenting our own metalanguage corpus resource and using it in a short sample analysis to discuss the applications of such resources in linguistics and social sciences. Specifically, the paper presents for the first time MetaLangCORP, a multielement corpus of contemporary media metalanguage in languages of three post-Yugoslav states, linguistically annotated and made available open-access at the CLARIN repository of linguistic resources. To put the corpus in context, the meaning and relevance of metalanguage research is outlined, the existing efforts at compiling corpora of metalanguage are reviewed, and a sample preliminary analysis of MetaLangCORP keywords is presented to open a broader discussion on the potential applicability of metalanguage corpora. More broadly, it is hoped that making this kind of data available will prompt more nuanced analyses of metalanguage, as well as more corpus-building efforts along similar lines in Slavic and other linguistic scholarship.