Bringing Corpus Linguistics into Religious Studies: Self-representation amongst various immigrant communities with religious identity

This paper explores the interaction between corpus linguistics and the social sciences. We will use a type of social scientific data broadly oriented to questions in the humanities to investigate the extent to and the ways in which corpus linguistics methods contribute to research in the field of Religious Studies, and in the social sciences and humanities at large. The corpus consists of 73 interviews (357,788 words) with immigrant communities living in the UK, from various religious (Muslims, Hindus and Christians), ethnical and cultural backgrounds. These interviews were conducted in 2005 as part of a government-commissioned study broadly oriented to policy-makers, but located within the disciplinary approach of Religious Studies. We will examine common patterns of self-representation amongst various immigrant communities with religious identity, that are also economically integrated into British society. The major contribution of this paper is to assess how corpus linguistics methods can complement, refine and offer new insights to the type of discourse analysis currently established within the social sciences. At the same time, we seek to test the limits of corpus methods, given the data might not be either qualitatively or quantitatively apt in all respects for corpus techniques