Corpus-based Studies across Humanities

About this journal

Corpus-based Studies across the Humanities (CSH) is a peer-reviewed international journal that publishes original and innovative, theoretical and applied/empirical corpus-based research in the Humanities. Recognising the increasing use of corpora across the Humanities, it aims to offer an interdisciplinary, transnational research forum for scholars from a wide range of sub-fields in the Humanities who carry out critical and original corpus-based research with highest scholarly standards in any area of the Humanities, encompassing linguistics, translation studies, the digital humanities, the medical humanities, film studies, philosophy, history, literature, law, art, and archaeology. It also welcomes contributions on the types of software for the development of corpora that support studies in the Humanities (from a computational angle). The language of the journal is English. The review section is to introduce and critically discuss the most important recent publications on corpus-based approaches as well as software development. CSH also publishes reviews of books relevant to corpus-based studies across the Humanities.

Article formats
Research articles, Review articles, Book reviews

Open Access
Detection and Analysis of Depression-Related Language in an Online Community: Machine Learning, Topic Modeling, and Corpus-Linguistic Approaches

July 2, 2025

Youngmeen Kim, Ute Römer-Barron

Download PDF

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders worldwide and may affect an individual’s ability to perform essential life activities. Still, “less than 25 % of individuals with depression receive adequate treatment” (American Association of Suicidology 2009). Instead of requesting support from mental health professionals, individuals often seek help through online communities. The main objectives of this study are to analyze the linguistic characteristics in a corpus of posts written by members of the depression community on Reddit and to investigate the major topics discussed in this community. To meet these objectives, we employed machine learning, topic modeling, and linguistic analysis. Results show that depression-related posts can be detected at an accuracy rate of 95.74 % using a Support Vector Machine with n-grams, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, and the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner as features. Additionally, BERTopic revealed the most frequently discussed topics, which included substance use and depressive symptoms. Further linguistic interpretation of these results highlighted patterns of self-reference and negative self-evaluation. The study provides new insights into the linguistic expressions used by members of the online depression community, which facilitates a better understanding of affected individuals and could help in developing strategies for detecting and treating depression.
Open Access
Chinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation

July 1, 2025

Longwei Zheng

Download PDF
Open Access
Corpora in Interpreting Studies: East Asian Perspectives

January 1, 2000

Yao Yao, Dechao Li

Download PDF
Open Access
A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Actors and Actions in Newspaper Reportage on Domestic Violence in Nigeria

January 1, 2000

Tolulope Akinseye

Download PDF

Media representations of domestic violence significantly shape societal perceptions of gender roles and the dynamics of victimhood and perpetration. Despite ongoing research on domestic violence in Nigeria, a notable gap remains in understanding how male and female social actors are represented in the context of domestic violence. This study aims to fill that gap through a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of media coverage on domestic violence in Nigeria over a decade (2013–2023), a period sufficiently long to derive meaningful conclusions about the evolution of gender representation in media narratives. Utilising van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic framework, complemented by M.A.K. Halliday’s Transitivity system, the study revealed that Nigerian newspapers predominantly represents female social actors as victims, while male social actors are more frequently depicted as aggressors and, less often, as victims of domestic violence. These findings indicate that media narratives contribute to a distorted public perception of domestic violence, reinforcing entrenched gender biases.
Open Access
Borrowed Akan Discourse-Pragmatic Markers in Ghanaian English

January 1, 2000

Jemima Asabea Anderson, Clement K. I. Appah, Rachel G. A. Thompson

Download PDF

This study examines the use of five frequently occurring Akan discourse-pragmatic markers, bi , deɛ , ankasa , mpo , and biaa , in Ghanaian English. Based on a qualitative analysis of examples drawn from the Global Web-based English (GloWbE) corpus and situated within postcolonial corpus pragmatics, the study analyzes their syntactic positioning, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions. These markers tend to occur in post-nominal or clause-final positions, reflecting substrate influence from Akan. They serve as resources for expressing stance, contrast, scalar emphasis, and categorical assertion. Instances of double marking (e.g., even and mpo ) suggest deliberate intensification rather than redundancy. Their usage reflects the influence of indigenous language expressive norms on Ghanaian English, illustrating how discourse-pragmatic borrowing shapes localized communicative styles and contributes to ongoing processes of linguistic innovation in postcolonial contexts. The study demonstrates how corpus pragmatics can uncover discourse-pragmatic borrowing and rhetorical convergence in World Englishes.
Open Access
A Corpus-Based Analysis of “Ageing Population” Discourse in Hong Kong Legislative Council Hansards

January 1, 2000

Emmanuel Mensah Bonsu

Download PDF

Drawing on corpus linguistic approaches and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, the study analysed “ageing population” discourse in 303 English Hansard records from Hong Kong’s Sixth Legislative Council (2016–2021) containing 15.7 million tokens. Collocation analysis showed that “ageing” and “population” appeared in contexts of urgency and negative framing, reinforcing demographic change as inherently problematic. Concordance analysis identified healthcare system challenges and economic and fiscal burden as two dominant themes concerning ageing population. The findings demonstrate that Hong Kong’s legislative discourse actively constructs demographic ageing as a deficit. The findings highlight the need for policy development, effective communication strategies, and asset-based approaches to policy formulation. The study demonstrates the “added value” of corpus linguistics for revealing discursive patterns in institutional discourse.

Submission

Manuscripts must be submitted via the journal’s submission system at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/csh.

Your benefits of publishing with us

All articles published open access with a CC BY 4.0 license without costs for the author.
High quality manuscript processing.
Every article easily discoverable because of SEO and comprehensive abstracting and indexing services.
Secure archiving by De Gruyter and the independent archiving service Portico.

Submission process

Please format your manuscript according to the Information for Authors.
The journal operates a double-blind peer review process.
All initial submissions are checked for plagiarism via Crossref Similarity Check.
The reviewing process takes on average two months. Submissions are sent to 2–3 reviewers. You will be informed by e-mail if your manuscript has been accepted or rejected or if it requires further attention. Every effort is made to respond to authors in a timely manner.

Please note

Before submitting your article, please have a look at our Publication Ethics Statement and the journal’s License to Publish.
If you have any general questions, please visit our FAQ page for journal authors.

We look forward to receiving your manuscript!

Editor in Chief
Kaibao Hu
Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications
Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
E-mail: 2019001@shisu.edu.cn

Tony McEnery
English Language and Linguistics,
Lancaster University, UK
E-mail: a.mcenery@lancaster.ac.uk

Associate Editors
Lei Lei
Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications
Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
E-mail: leileicn@shisu.edu.cn

Book Reviews Editor
Muhammad Afzaal
Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications
Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
E-mail: afzaal@shisu.edu.cn

Advisory board
Clyde Ancarno (King’s college London, UK)
Mona Baker (University of Oslo, Norway)
Katherine Bode (Australian National University, Australia)
Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Eivind Engebretsen (University of Oslo, Norway)
Hong Huqing (Shanghai International Studies University, China)
Rita Lucarelli (USA)
Saturino Luz (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Emmanuel Ngué Um (University of Yaoundé 1, Cameroon)
Binhua Wang (University of Leeds, UK)

Corpus-based Studies across Humanities is covered by the following services:

CNKI Scholar (China National Knowledge Infrastructure)
CNPIEC - cnpLINKer
Dimensions
EBSCO Discovery Service
Google Scholar
J-Gate
Naver Academic
Naviga (Softweco)
Primo Central (ExLibris)
ReadCube
ScienceON (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information)
Scilit
Semantic Scholar
Summon (ProQuest)
TDNet
WanFang Data
WorldCat (OCLC)
X-MOL
Yewno Discover

Journal information

Additional information

eISSN:

2940-1445

Language:

English

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Additional information

First published:

May 1, 2023

Publication Frequency:

2 issues per year

Corpus-based Studies across Humanities

About this journal

Supplementary Materials

Topics

Corpus-based Studies across Humanities

Overview

About this journal

Ahead of Publication / Just Accepted

Issues

Submit

Editorial

Abstracting and Indexing

Supplementary Materials

Supplementary Materials

Topics

Topics

External Links

Bibliographic data