Nathan Dykes

I am a postdoctoral researcher in digital linguistics at the School of Languages and Translation Studies and the TurkuNLP at the University of Turku in Finland. I am working as part of the Human Diversity through Contacts Centre of Excellence. My current research examines how actors categorise themselves and others, and formulate speech acts across regions, domains and registers online, and how such linguistic choices are negotiated in discourse. This programme builds on my methodological work in corpus-based discourse analysis: making the analytical choices of corpus-assisted discourse studies explicit, transferable and accountable, and developing corpus-based and algorithmically assisted methods. Interdisciplinary collaborations have spanned computer science, law, medicine and literary studies.

My doctoral thesis, A Methodological Framework for Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis (2026), is available in full open access. A revised version is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic in the Corpus and Discourse series, under the title Traceable Interpretation through Linguistic Description: Lexis, Semantics and Lexicogrammar. Beyond discourse, my research has taken me into argumentation mining (with computer scientists), medical and legal language (with domain experts), and corpus construction and annotation work for social media and web data. I have also worked on concordance-based approaches to literary stylistics and on bridging digital linguistics with digital humanities more broadly. I bring a background in computational linguistics and have programming experience in Python and R.