Chapter 7 considers how language change over short timespans can be examined using corpus-assisted methods. We present three case studies. The first study involves a corpus of patient feedback relating to cancer care, collected for four consecutive years. A technique called the coefficient of variation was used to identify lexical items that had increased or decreased over time. The second study considered UK newspaper articles about obesity. To examine changing themes over time, we employed a combination of keyness and concordance analyses to identify which themes in the corpus were becoming more or less popular over time. Additionally, the analysis considered time in a different way, by using the concept of the annual news cycle. To this end, the corpus was divided into 12 parts, consisting of articles published according to a particular month, and the same type of analysis was applied to each part. The third case study involves an analysis of a corpus of forum posts about anxiety. Time was considered in terms of the age of the poster and in terms of the number of contributions that a poster had made to the forum, and differences were found depending on both approaches to time.

Chapter 2 is concerned with research questions. We discuss the different processes through which research questions can be identified and developed in corpus-based research on health communication. Three case studies are considered. The first study involved the analysis of press representations of obesity. In this study, the researchers developed their own research questions in a variety of ways, including by drawing from the non-linguistic literature on obesity. The second study focused on the McGill Pain Questionnaire – a well-known language-based diagnostic tool for pain. A pain consultant asked the researchers if they could help understand why some patients find it difficult to respond to some sections of the questionnaire. In response, the researchers formulated a series of questions that could be answered using corpus linguistic tools, and identified some issues with the questionnaire that address the pain consultant’s concerns. The third study involved the analysis of patient feedback on the UK’s National Health Service. The researchers were approached by the NHS Feedback Team and given 12 questions that they were commissioned to answer by means of corpus linguistic methods.