One’s company, two’s a crowd: A cultural corpus-based study of loneliness and solitude in the United States

The present thesis aims to investigate the cultural profile of the notions of loneliness and solitude in American culture. To do so, the discipline of Cultural linguistics is complemented by corpus linguistics methods, in two different corpus-based studies. The first study investigates the differences and similarities of loneliness and solitude across individualist and collectivist cultures. The second study focuses on the United States only, with the collection of a corpus of advice columns, and research on the emotions connected to the state of being alone.