Discourse on the Move Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure |
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| Author:
| Biber, Douglas
Connor, Ulla
Upton, Thomas A. |
| Series title: | Studies in Corpus Linguistics Ser. |
| ISBN: | 978-90-272-2302-9 |
| Publication Date: | Sep 2007 |
| Publisher: | John Benjamins Publishing Company
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| Book Format: | Hardback |
| List Price: | USD $158.00 |
Book Description:
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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...
More Description 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.