How could you study “cultural differences” using corpora? [closed]

Question

Anyone who’s traveled has come upon a sense of there being some “cultural differences”, but my mind is always seeking to systematize things, and I’ve wondered if there is a better way to collect tons of data and examples and analyze it methodically.

I know corpora are used to study language features like syntax or lexicography, but I’m wondering if they could also be used to identify “cultural differences”. What aspects of “culture” could actually be studyable and identifiable just from language - whether the corpus is human-tagged, or analyzed with computers?

Put differently, since corpora are huge compendia of information - where is the boundary of what might not be capturable, only from a corpus?

The question asks ultimately about the lexical hypothesis - that language encodes the world as knowledge, so, putatively, huge amounts of knowledge about the social world genuinely are manifested in patterns in language data. (Which is a disputable proposition).

So, what are the specific features of “culture” - observable language data - when we are talking about corpora?

For example, conversation and discourse analysis: what do people say in different social settings, based on various intentions?

Could there be a good, complete list of topics encompassing what “culture-focused discourse analysis” is able to study - not a partial one?

Answer 1

Cultural differences include various aspects that can be observed in the use of honorifics, speech acts, and power dynamics among participants. For example, Upton and Connor (2001) examined politeness strategies (e.g., use of hedging) used by Americans, Finns, and Belgians in a learner corpus. It would be helpful to tell us your own research question, so readers can give you a more specific lead. Without a particular research question, it seems irrelevant to share discoveries and findings here.