Corpus Analysis: Building and Using Corpora—A Case Study on the Use of “Conspiracy Theory”

Corpus analysis allows researchers to inform, illuminate, and investigate many problems. This chapter provides easy access to some of the central tools commonly used in corpus linguistics. After a short exploration of pre-built corpora and a brief literature review surveying corpus-analytic studies in philosophy, we illustrate these tools by running several corpus analyses on the term “conspiracy theory.” These analyses show that “conspiracy theory” is a strongly evaluative term. The reader of this chapter can follow each of the steps of the corpus analyses using the online material that is freely available.