Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics · University of Queensland
Martin Schweinberger
Computational corpus linguist specialising in language variation, digital discourse, and language data science. Director of LADAL and CI of LDaCA.
About
My name is Martin Schweinberger and I am Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Director of Research at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. I am Director of the Language Technology and Data Analysis Laboratory (LADAL) and a quantitative corpus linguist specialised in computational analyses of text and speech.
I am Steering Committee member and Chief Investigator (CI) of the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA). I am Associate Editor of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL), Editorial Board member of the Journal of English and Applied Linguistics, and book series editor for the Bloomsbury series Language, Data Science and Digital Humanities. I am Vice-President Profession of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) and board member of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME).
I hold a PhD in English linguistics from Universität Hamburg (magna cum laude) and an MA from Universität Kassel (1.1). I am a native speaker of German and work at near-native level in English.
Research focus
What I work on
Language Variation & Change
Mechanisms of change in English amplifier systems, discourse markers, and particles across varieties of English — with particular focus on Irish, Australian, and New Zealand English.
Digital Discourse & Vulgarity
Corpus-based analysis of vulgarity, impoliteness, and sociolinguistic variation in online and social media discourse — combining computational and interpretive-pragmatic methods.
Language Data Science
Computational humanities, text analytics, NLP, and machine learning applied to language data — with a strong commitment to reproducibility, open science, and FAIR data principles.
Research Infrastructure
Building open-access digital research infrastructure for the humanities — directing LADAL and contributing to LDaCA, Australia's national language data commons, reaching 500K+ researchers worldwide.
Learner Language & Applied Linguistics
Corpus-based and experimental studies of how L2 speakers acquire variation in amplification, discourse markers, and pragmatic constructions — combining learner corpus research with insights for EFL pedagogy and language assessment.
Computational Acoustic Phonetics
Automated extraction and machine-learning analysis of vowel formants and voice-onset times in L1 and L2 speech — using Praat and R to map learner pronunciation against native-speaker norms and generate personalised feedback.
Publication
Books under contract and Edited Special Issues
Data-Intensive Pragmatics: Doing Pragmatics at Scale
Cambridge Elements in Pragmatics · Eds. Jonathan Culpeper & Michael Haugh
Contract signed 11/2025 · Manuscript due 09/2026
Bad Language and Vulgarity Online and in Public Discourse
Co-edited with Kate Burridge and Paula Rautionaho
Lingua
Reproducibility, Replication and Robustness in Corpus Linguistics
Co-edited with Michael Haugh
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Address Terms in World Englishes
Co-edited with Anke Lensch and Hanna Bruns
World Englishes
Latest
News
26-30/05/2026 — Lara Putensen will present our talk Pop Goes Profanity: Vulgarity Trends in English Chart Hits from 2000 to 2024 at ICAME47 in Koblenz.
12/12/2025 — Invited talk on Vulgarity in World Englishes at LMU Munich (Stephanie Hackert). (slides)
7/11/2025 — Talk on Vulgarity in Spoken Interaction Across Englishes + Lightning Talk on Data Structure Harmonization at the Forum on Englishes in Australia, Melbourne.
12/10/2025 — Invited lecture on Vulgarity in World Englishes at the University of South Australia. (slides) · (recording)
13/6/2025 — New article in The Conversation: “201 ways to say ‘fuck’: what 1.7 billion words of online text shows about how the world swears” (with Kate Burridge).
23/5/2025 — National TV coverage — Kate’s and my study on vulgarity featured on Channel 10 News.
22–23/5/2025 — Interviews on ABC Drive (Ellen Fanning) and ABC Radio Melbourne (Ali Moore) discussing vulgarity in public discourse. Listen (ABC Drive) · Open-access paper
27/1/2025 — Invited talk at Universität Hamburg on Indigenous Australian Languages & LDaCA. (slides)
25/11/2024 — Invited talk at Universität Bonn on Vulgarity in Online Discourse. (slides)
16/12/2023 — Invited application talk at Universität Innsbruck on adjective amplification. (slides)
19/1/2023 — Workshop on conditional inference trees at Universität Bonn. (materials)
13/1/2023 — Invited talk on Reproducibility in corpus-based analyses of learner speech at Universität Hamburg. (slides)
25/10/2022 — Talk on transparency and reproducibility in Corpus Linguistics for the Sydney Corpus Lab. (slides)