Mathew Gillings
Current teaching: Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods & Data Analysis; Applied Research Projects; Critical Perspectives on Management Communication; Key Concepts in International Business Communication
Go to eVVZ for Gillings’ current lectures.
About
Mathew Gillings is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Language and Discourse in Business at the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, where he teaches on the MSc in Business Communication. Before joining the WU, Mathew completed his PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University (UK), where he was also employed as an Associate Lecturer teaching on the undergraduate English Language and Corporate Communication modules. As a member of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Mathew was involved with various corpus compilation projects, including the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project and the Written BNC2014.
He is a member of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), International Communication Association (ICA), and a member of the Research Committee for the Association for Business Communication (ABC). He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, member of the editorial board for the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, and can be found on X at: @mathewgillings.
Other professional activity includes holding workshops as part of the WU in-house faculty training programme, engaging in language analysis consultancy, (academic) proofreading and coaching. In doing so, he has worked with a number of organisations both in the UK, and across the DACH region.
Research Interests
Mathew’s research interests are located broadly within the field of corpus linguistics, a method used to analyse large amounts of naturally-occurring discourse data both quantitatively and qualitatively. His previous and ongoing research combines the method with:
(Critical) discourse analysis, examining societal discourses on a large scale (e.g., climate change discourse, business discourse, political discourse, media discourse);
Forensic linguistics, including deception and communicating wrongdoing in times of crisis;
(Im)politeness, in particular how practices vary across a range of social groups (e.g., across speakers, settings, regions, cultures).
Much of this work takes a methodological angle, examining the differing epistemologies of a range of research methods commonly used throughout linguistics and communications. This has included, for example, exploring how results derived from corpus-assisted investigations can complement those derived from more qualitative discourse analytical close reading, or those from more quantitative approaches such as topic modelling and LLMs. A key focus is on interdisciplinary collaboration, exploring how corpus linguistic techniques can be applied to different areas of linguistics and communications, the humanities, social sciences, and beyond.
In February 2025, Mathew was featured as part of the WU's "Meet our Researchers" series.
A full list of publications and research activities can be found in PURE.
Book (monograph)
Journal article
2025 | Gillings, Mathew, Jaworska, Sylvia. 2025. How humans and machines identify discourse topics: a methodological triangulation. Read more |
2024 | Gillings, Mathew, Kopf, Susanne. 2024. Business communication through a corpus linguistic lens. Read more |
2024 | Gillings, Mathew, Kohn, Tobias, Mautner, Gerlinde. 2024. The rise of large language models: challenges for Critical Discourse Studies. Read more |
2024 | van Dorst, Isolde, Gillings, Mathew, Culpeper, Jonathan. 2024. Sociopragmatic variation in Britain: A corpus-based study of politeness. Read more |
2024 | Chan, JJ, Gillings, Mathew. 2024. Constructions and representations of Chinese identity through England's curatorial imagination: A corpus-assisted analysis. Read more |
2024 | Gillings, Mathew, Learmonth, Mark, Mautner, Gerlinde. 2024. Taking the road less travelled: How corpus-assisted discourse studies can enrich qualitative explorations of large textual datasets. Read more |
2024 | Gillings, Mathew, Mautner, Gerlinde. 2024. Concordancing for CADS: Practical challenges and theoretical implications. Read more |
2024 | Gillings, Mathew, Dayrell, Carmen. 2024. Climate change in the UK press: Examining discourse fluctuation over time. Read more |
2023 | Gillings, Mathew, Hardie, Andrew. 2023. The interpretation of topic models for scholarly analysis: An evaluation and critique of current practice. Read more |
2020 | Murphy, Sean, Culpeper, Jonathan, Gillings, Mathew, Pace-Sigge, Michael. 2020. What do students find difficult when they read Shakespeare? Problems and solutions. Read more |
2020 | Archer, Dawn, Gillings, Mathew. 2020. Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters. Read more |
2019 | Culpeper, Jonathan, Gillings, Mathew. 2019. Pragmatics: Data trends. Read more |
Chapter in edited volume
2024 | Gillings, Mathew, Mautner, Gerlinde. 2024. Concordance lines: What are they and how can they be used to explore representation? In: Analysing Representation: A Corpus and Discourse Textbook. Hrsg. Heritage, Frazer, Taylor, Charlotte. Read more |
2024 | Gillings, Mathew. 2024. Politics, religion, and drama In: The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy. Hrsg. Sorlin, Sandrine, Virtanen, Tuija. Read more |
2022 | Gillings, Mathew. 2022. How to use corpus linguistics in forensic linguistics In: The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Hrsg. O'Keeffe , A. , McCarthy, M. . Read more |
2018 | Culpeper, Jonathan, Gillings, Mathew. 2018. Politeness variation in England: A north-south divide? In: Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech: Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken BNC2014. Hrsg. Vaclav Brezina, Robbie Love, and Karin Aijmer. Read more |