Cultural Keywords in Varieties Research

One of the four most central corpus-linguistic methods is keywords/keyness analysis, which is generally the identification and interpretation of word types of a target corpus ( T) that, when compared to their occurrence in a reference corpus ( R), are key/characteristic for T. In this article, I will (a) apply methods proposed by Gries (2021) to the study of three outer-circle varieties of English to identify cultural keywords in a bottom-up fashion and (b) use the results from that first application to advance two suggestions how to extend keyness analyses to better understand the keywords from the first step: key collocates, which involves applying keyness to contexts of keywords; and deep key collocates, which involves distributional semantics methods like word2vec, GloVe, BERT, etc. to keywords. I will use Mukherjee and Bernaisch's (2015) keyness analysis as a launchpad to identify keywords from comparisons of Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan Englishes (IndE, PakE, and SriE, respectively) and zoom in on the variety-specific differences of the keyword of terror. The results not only indicate what terms are key for which of the three varieties; they also allow for a new level of granularity in how keywords use differs across varieties and possibly cultures. For example, in the PakE data, newspaper coverage of terror is mostly discussed with regard its financial aspects and implications and matters of communication, whereas in IndE and SriE, terror is much more approached from a military and a religious perspective, respectively. 1