Plurilingual corpora and polylanguaging, where corpus linguistics meets contact linguistics

Language contact and multilingualism issues are addressed by such diverse research traditions that we consider corpora and data exchange as good ways to make these traditions speak to one another. In this paper, we describe a methodology for detailed analysis of heterogeneous corpora which can be used to take into account both synchronic phenomena (linguistic variation and instances of polylanguaging or codeswitching) and diachronic phenomena. We point out the epistemological questions that arise in the analysis of plurilingual data and discuss the choices made with respect to the current norms and standards followed in corpus linguistics with view to providing multi-factorial explanations in the field of language contact and multilingualism. We rely here on the methodology developed in the research project CLAPOTY.