Creating a Corpus for the Analysis of Identity Traits in English Specialised Discourse

This chapter describes the creation of a corpus of texts selected from various academic journals in four different disciplinary contexts. Such corpus is part of a more general project funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and coordinated by the University of Bergamo and is meant to facilitate the investigation of identity traits typical of different branches of English specialised discourse. More specifically, the study seeks to investigate to what extent the cultural allegiance of (native or non-native) Anglophone discourse communities to their (linguistic, professional, social, national) reference group is affected by the use of English as a lingua franca of international communication. This chapter will concentrate on the criteria followed in the construction of such a specialised digital corpus and will discuss some critical aspects pertaining to the corpus design, the collection and classification of texts according to their genre, the gathering of ethnographic data on the communicative events and actors involved, and the reconstruction of the general and specific sociolinguistic context of such texts.