The HLVC project applies consistent methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation to a range of languages and dependent variables. This is meant to mitigate the pattern of diverse findings from diverse studies that may partially result from diverse methods. This chapter therefore describes how the corpus is constructed, focusing on the cross-linguistic, cross-generational, and multi-method design, and gives details about recruiting, recording, and transcription of the sociolinguistic interview, the ethnic orientation questionnaire, the picture description task, and the consent procedure. It then describes the workflow for data processing and metadata construction, describing both how the corpus is organized (to be useful to additional researchers) and how we have analyzed variation of a number of variables to date. These include prodrop, case-marking, VOT, and (r) across multiple languages, apocope and differential object marking in Italian, and tone mergers, classifiers, motion-even marking, denasalization (an element of so-called lazy pronunciation, 懶音 laan5 jam1), and vowel space in Cantonese. It details the methods of analyzing ethnic orientation and several proxies for fluency (speech rate, vocabulary size, language-switching measures). Finally, it describes the methods used for constructing and comparing mixed-effects models for cross-variety comparisons in order to distinguish contact-induced change, internal change, and identity-marking variation.

This chapter is about the design of corpora and types of corpora. Changes in the concept of a corpus are discussed, in particular the provision of metadata to allow personalised sub-corpora to be compiled on an ad hoc basis from a large corpus. The design features of size, balance, representativeness and comparability are discussed, with an emphasis on the constraints imposed by practical concerns. These types of corpora are explained: general or reference, specialised corpus, diachronic, monitor, learner, pedagogic, multilingual (parallel and comparable) and multimodal. Specific issues involved in compiling corpora from particular sources are discussed. The chapter includes a list of corpora that are referred to frequently in the rest of the book.

We propose that the representativeness of a corpus directly depends on its suitability for a specific research goal (including the domain and the linguistic feature(s) of interest). Creating a new corpus involves establishing linguistic research question(s), addressing domain considerations, including describing the domain, operationalizing the domain, evaluating the operational domain (relative to the full domain), designing the corpus, and evaluating the corpus (relative to the operational domain), addressing distribution considerations, including defining a linguistic variable and evaluating the required sample size, collecting the corpus, and documenting and reporting corpus design and representativeness. The steps for evaluating an existing corpus are similar: establishing linguistic research question(s), identifying and acquire the corpus and its documentation, addressing domain considerations, including describing the domain and evaluating the operational domain relative to the full domain, and the corpus relative to the operational domain, addressing distribution considerations, including defining a linguistic variable and evaluating the required sample size, and documenting and reporting corpus design and representativeness. We conclude the book by arguing that corpus representativeness is important for both corpus designers/builders, and corpus researchers who need to evaluate whether a corpus is appropriate for their research goals.

Recent developments in the experimental syntax program have challenged some of the standard practices for collecting and analyzing linguistic evidence. In doing so, the methodological and theoretical gap between other areas of language science has begun to close. It is more common than ever before for research in theoretical syntax to incorporate multiple methodologies in the same study. Online elicitation methods, adopted from psycholinguistics, have been the most visible new addition to the theoretical syntactician’s toolbox. Yet observational data, in the form of corpora, has begun to play a larger role in contemporary syntactic investigation. The aim of this chapter is to contextualize the evolving role of corpus studies in syntactic investigation as a methodology that can be used to externally validate results from other methods as well as generate hypotheses. I highlight theoretical and practical advantages of employing corpora in tandem with other methods and point to future directions where gains can still be made.

A stated goal of language documentation is to make language resources available for use in language revitalization. This chapter identifies some limitations and challenges of working with language documentation materials, particularly legacy (historical) documents and resources in digital language archives. It then suggests ways that language documenters can make their work more useful for revitalization purposes. It identifies often-ignored areas that documentation should target, such as family language, everyday usage and young people’s speech, and suggests further contextual information and metadata that should be included. Language revitalizers can also adopt the methods, practices and tools of language documenters and should be encouraged to document the processes, decision-making, events, successes and failures of their work so that they and others can learn from them. The capsules present technical advice on making audio and video language documentation recordings; a community-based research model for field methods courses on revitalization; and outcomes of a pilot study on Alznerish conducted during a field school in Poland, with methodological proposals for short-term studies.