This chapter explores how members of the online incel community interact with (presumably) new members on the subreddit r/Braincels. It seeks to explore why new members might stay on a website known for hostility and poor mental health. Through the use of corpus linguistic methods, I explore ways that members of the community might interact with newcomers. I argue that users do not index their identity as new on the forum through lexemes such as new or first, and that there appears to be few repeated and explicit ways that members signal posting on the forum for the first time. As such, I analyse how incels construct their community, by using corpus linguistic methods and Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework. I argue that the members of the incel community constructed their group as ‘toxic’, but also as a place where they were able to receive mental health support. Ultimately, I argue that more work needs to be done to explore not only why people might engage with these kinds of forums, but also how members of the incel community convince people to stay engaged.

This chapter provides practical and theoretical insights into corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), an increasingly popular framework for studying language-in-use. By drawing upon both discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, CADS combines methods of text analysis commonly perceived as qualitative and quantitative, respectively. Despite challenges, the main appeal lies in CADS’ ability to reconcile close linguistic analyses with the more broad-ranging analyses made possible by using corpus linguistic methods to analyse language. In addition to providing theoretical insights into CADS, this chapter examines what CADS involves from a practical point of view, e.g. by discussing specific corpus outputs, examples of ways in which qualitative and quantitative approaches to discourse analysis are synergized and triangulated, and the extent to which CADS differs from other kinds of discourse analysis relying on one or more non-corpus-informed approaches in discourse analysis. Interdisciplinary applications in CADS are also considered.