Discourse on the Move: Using corpus analysis to describe discourse structure

by Douglas Biber, Ulla Connor, Thomas A. Upton

Overview

Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789027223029
Publisher:	John Benjamins Publishing Company
Publication date:	09/19/2007
Series:	Studies in Corpus Linguistics , #28
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	301
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.70(h) x 0.90(d)

Editorial Reviews

The integration of corpus-based approaches with top-down discourse analysis in this volume is a significant achievement, and its clearly described procedures will be valuable to anybody attempting further work of this kind.

John M. Swales

Discourse on the Move is interesting and inspiring. It is a valuable work of synthesis, where several previous approaches are combined to produce more extensive and comprehensive findings. The book is aimed at corpus linguists, but it can be informative also for those computational linguists, NLP researchrs and language engineers who are keen to incorporate language variation and genre specifics into computational models.

Marina Santini