Discourse on the Move
Using corpus analysis to describe discourse structure
- Author(s): Douglas Biber 1 , Ulla Connor 2 and Thomas A. Upton 2
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 Northern Arizona University2 Indiana University - Indianapolis
- Format: PDF
- Publication Date September 2007
- e-Book ISBN: 9789027291912
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.28
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.
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