Schedule 80. StuTS

Linguistic research often seeks patterns that generalize across speakers and communities. But what can we learn when we take the individual speaker as our primary unit of analysis? The VolkswagenStiftung project Idiolinguistics addresses this question by shifting attention from aggregate language systems to individual linguistic behaviour and by combining intensive longitudinal language data with experimental measures of linguistic representation.
At the centre of the project is the Corpus of Situational Individual Variation (CorSIV), which follows ten speakers over 2.5 years. At repeated sampling points, the project collects digital communication, conversational recordings, sociolinguistic interviews, information about media consumption, auto-ethnographic writing, and experimental data. This creates the possibility of connecting what people encounter and produce in their everyday linguistic lives with how language is represented and processed cognitively.
To illustrate what such an approach can look like in practice, I will draw on my PhD project on affect and lexical entrenchment. The project asks whether the affective properties of words, particularly valence and arousal, contribute to lexical entrenchment beyond frequency of exposure. It combines a population-level corpus study using COCA and normative affect ratings with an individual-level study linking CorSIV exposure data, individual affective ratings, and experimental measures of lexical entrenchment.
More broadly, the talk aims to show how corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and longitudinal research can be brought together to investigate language at the level of the individual.