A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Youtube Coming out Videos
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St. Cloud State University theRepository at St. Cloud State Culminating Projects in TESL Department of English 5-2019 A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of YouTube Coming Out Videos Mikhail Zaikovskii St Cloud State University Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/tesl_etds Recommended Citation Zaikovskii, Mikhail, "A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of YouTube Coming Out Videos" (2019). Culminating Projects in TESL. 25. https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/tesl_etds/25 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at theRepository at St. Cloud State. It has been accepted for inclusion in Culminating Projects in TESL by an authorized administrator of theRepository at St. Cloud State. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of YouTube Coming Out Videos by Mikhail Zaikovskii A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of St. Cloud State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English: Teaching English as a Second Language October, 2019 Thesis Committee: Edward Sadrai, Chairperson Choonkyong Kim Maria Mikolchak 2 Abstract With the spread of the Internet and social media, researchers were presented with a novel object for investigation – YouTube Coming Out videos. Scholars quickly took up on scrutinizing the phenomenon from various perspectives: as a rhetorical action, an online sanctuary, a tool for developing and spreading the gay collective consciousness, etc. However, in the evolving diversity of studies on YouTube Coming Out videos, I failed to find any that are concerned with corpus linguistic analysis, which is highly instrumental in disclosing linguistic trends and unusual characteristics of the texts. Therefore, the main aim of the current study is through the means of corpus linguistics to investigate specific lexemes and collocations that have been used by YouTubers in their Coming Out Videos. More specifically, the study focuses on discovering the distribution of lexical items and collocations in the speech of the YouTubers and pinpointing major thematic groups that emerge from these keywords as a result of general qualitative coding. For the purposes of the current study, two hundred and four coming out stories were selected, vetted, and transcribed into the machine-readable format. The transcripts were further analyzed by the medium of corpus linguistics software that enabled revealing lists of keywords, frequencies, collocations, and concordance lines. Redistributing the most frequently occurring single- and multi-word keywords led to identification of emergent properties – in my case, major themes discussed by the narrators. Among the themes this study identified are Family, Education, Relationship, Social Media, Vlogging, General Gay-Related Items, Sexuality, Coming Out, Profanity, Homophobia, and Religion. The pinpointing and analysis of the themes and frequent collocations have expanded current studies on YouTube coming out narratives and facilitated better understanding of the contents and rationale behind sharing such deeply personal stories. Keywords: gay language, YouTube Coming Out videos, coming out, corpus linguistics, language and sexuality. 3 Acknowledgments To Dr. James Robinson, who believed in me enough to give me a chance to prove that I belong in his program. I cannot even fathom how much I am indebted to him. To Sofia Logvinenko, who introduced me to Saint Cloud State University. I still remember our very first conversation about the school on a sunny summer day in Moscow. She singlehandedly changed my life on that day. 4 Table of Contents Page List of Tables .................................................................................................................................. 6 List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. 7 Chapter I: Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 8 II: Literature Review ..................................................................................................................... 11 Language and Gender ....................................................................................................... 11 Queer Language ................................................................................................................ 15 The Phenomenon of Digital Coming Out Narratives ....................................................... 18 Corpus Linguistics ............................................................................................................ 22 III: Methodology ........................................................................................................................... 27 Searching for the Videos ................................................................................................... 27 Forming the Pools ............................................................................................................. 28 Analysis............................................................................................................................. 29 IV: Research Findings................................................................................................................... 32 Description of the Corpus ................................................................................................. 32 Frequency .......................................................................................................................... 34 Keywords .......................................................................................................................... 37 V: Analysis of Collocations and Concordances. The Discussions of The Analysis ..................... 48 Mutual Information ........................................................................................................... 48 Gay .................................................................................................................................... 49 5 Chapter Page Year and Grade ................................................................................................................. 56 Mom and Dad ................................................................................................................... 63 God and Religious............................................................................................................. 71 In Summary ....................................................................................................................... 79 VI: Limitations and Further Research........................................................................................... 87 VII: Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 90 References ..................................................................................................................................... 94 6 List of Tables Table Page 1. Most frequent lexical words and lemmas ................................................................... 35 2. Single-word Keywords ............................................................................................... 39 3. Single-word Keywords Themes .................................................................................. 41 4. Multi-word Keywords ................................................................................................. 42 5. Multi-word Keywords Themes ................................................................................... 44 6. Single-word vs. Multi-word Thematic Groups ........................................................... 45 7. Collocates of Gay ........................................................................................................ 49 8. Collocates of Year....................................................................................................... 56 9. Collocates of Grade..................................................................................................... 58 10. Collocates of Mom ...................................................................................................... 63 11. Collocates of Dad ........................................................................................................ 65 12. Collocates of God ....................................................................................................... 72 13. Collocates of Religious ............................................................................................... 74 7 List of Figures Figure Page 1. Collocates of Gay .......................................................................................................... 51 2. Collocates of Year......................................................................................................... 57 3. Collocates of Grade....................................................................................................... 59 4. Collocates of Mom ........................................................................................................ 65 5. Collocates of Dad .......................................................................................................... 67 6. Collocates of God ........................................................................................................