Corpus approaches to discourseCorpus approaches to discourse

What is a corpus?

a collection of spoken or written authentic texts that is representative of a particular area of language use, by virtue of its size and composition

usually computer-readable and able to be accessed with tools such as concordancers which are able to find and sort out language patterns

Kinds of corpora

General corpora

aim to represent language in its broadest sense and to serve as a widely available resource for baseline or comparative studies of general linguistic features (Reppen and Simpson 2004: 95).

Kinds of corpora

Specialized corpora

a corpus of texts of a particular type, such as newspaper editorials, geography textbooks, academic articles in a particular subject, lectures, casual conversations, essays written by students etc. It aims to be representative of a given type of text. It is used to investigate a particular type of language (Hunston 2002: 14)

Specialized corpora

The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English

The British Academic Spoken English corpus

The British Academic Written English corpus

The TOEFL Spoken and Written Academic Language corpus

Design and construction of corpora

Authenticity, representativeness and validity

Kinds of texts to include

Size of the texts

Sampling and representativeness

Discourse characteristics of conversational English

Non-clausal units

Personal pronouns and ellipsis

Situational ellipsis

Non-clausal units as elliptic replies

Repetition

Lexical bundles

Performance phenomena of conversational English

Silent and filled pauses

Utterance launchers and filled pauses

Attention signals

Response elicitors

Non-clausal items as response forms

Extended co-ordination of clauses

Constructional principles of conversational English

Keep talking

Limited planning ahead

Qualification of what has been said

Prefaces

Tags

Corpus studies of the social nature of discourse

Spoken language in academic settings(Swales 2003)

Dissertation acknowledgements (Hyland 2004)

Collocation and corpus studies

Dissertation acknowledgements (Hyland and Tse 2004)

Personal ads (Ooi 2001)

Corpus studies and academic writing

Academic Vocabulary in Context (Hirsh 2010)

University Language (Biber 2006)

Register, Genre, and Style (Biber and Conrad 2009)

Metadiscourse(Hyland 2005)

Academic Discourse(Hyland 2009)

Disciplinary Identities(Hyland 2012)

Criticisms of corpus studies

Contextual features to consider

Social context

Communicative purpose

Roles of readers and writers

Shared cultural values

Knowledge of other texts