Computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media corpora

The study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has received extensive attention in recent years, due to its impact on human communication and the immediacy of its form. This introduction briefly reports on some of the changes that CMC has undergone lately. The focus is on those topics currently considered to be central to the field, such as questions of identity and ideology, (im)politeness and face, humour, group creation and affiliation, verbal violence, cyberbullying, etc. Some observations are also made on the challenges that the compilation of CMC corpora poses for linguists, ranging from data copyright, anonymisation and representativeness to distinctive features of CMC texts, namely multimodality, non-standard language and non-sequential organisation. It also introduces each of the eight papers selected for this special issue of Research in Corpus Linguistics, highlighting their specific contribution to the field of CMC studies.