Abstract
The merging of corpus linguistics methodology into discourse analysis has been developing in linguistic research (e.g. Baker, 2006; Partington et al., 2004). This volume conforms to this trend, and its 14 chapters, providing an overall perspective on the incorporation of the two branches, can be divided into an introduction and three parts.
In Chapter 1, by the editors, concepts of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis are briefly introduced. After presenting previous key research and advantages of and debates about combining the two fields, Baker and McEnery then outline the structure of the book, with a brief description of each chapter.
The first part of the book (Chapters 2–5) focuses on discourse as text type. Chapter 2 (Knight) investigates core modal verbs in an e-language corpus and finds that e-language aligns more closely to speech than to writing, with high variability from one data-type to another. Taking dynamic discursive contexts into consideration, Chapter 3 (Adolphs, Knight and Carter) examines spoken language in use during a series of visits to galleries, shedding light on further enquiry of corpus linguistics aiming to go beyond text and language. Chapter 4 (Bednarek) expounds why and how multimodality can be integrated into corpus linguistic approaches to TV and film narratives. Chapter 5 (Aijmer) discusses the discourse marker actually in informal conversation in four national varieties and notes variation in terms of language variety and position, which suggests the need for corpus analysis to go beyond the concordance line.
The second part of the book (Chapters 6–10) is dedicated to discourse related to social practice. Chapter 6 (Bevitori), with a diachronic corpus-assisted approach, analyzes the discursive constructions of environment in presidential speeches (1960–2013), demonstrating that its unfixed and interrelated meanings are associated with the changing political context. Examining online eating disorder discourse, Chapter 7 (Hunt and Harvey) illustrates that the dominant lexical features obtained from the corpus are also valuable to identify the cohesive and rhetorical functions of lexical items in longer texts. Through multidimensional analysis of students’ academic writing, Chapter 8 (Hardy) provides evidence of language variation in discourse communities and concludes that multidimensional analysis can be ‘a stepping-stone or a starting block’ (p. 172) to explore social and functional purposes of texts. By comparing the thought presentation in news writing of Early Modern English (a manually categorized dataset) and Present Day English (untagged), Chapter 9 (Walker and McIntyre) discovers thought presentation is used for a number of purposes, indicating that, methodologically, a small tagged corpus can be used to uncover discourse patterns and generate hypotheses. Chapter 10 (Hocking) explains how corpus tools can be integrated with sociological and discourse-analytical methods in a multi-perspective study of creative practice in the tertiary art and design setting.
The third part of the book (Chapters 11–14) deals with discourse as ideology. By adopting a corpus-assisted diachronic and comparative method, Chapter 11 (Partington) displays how the phrase Arab world is represented in three different English language newspapers, showing that comparative corpus analysis can disclose a variety of representations in one particular media outlet. Chapter 12 (Baker and McEnery), based on a Twitter corpus around the British Benefits Street Debate, probes into discourses on the social media, an indicator of public feelings, and offers evidence that discourse communities can be teased apart with corpus analysis. By looking at the words of body parts used by males and females in the Harry Potter series, Chapter 13 (Hunt) reveals that representation of agency is clearly male gendered, supporting that corpus methods are helpful for critical discourse analysis. Using a semantic tagging method and following the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis, Chapter 14 (Potts) accesses the semantic preference of the word people in Hurricane Katrina reportage, showing how identity is constructed in newspapers.
This volume of examples of discourse studies has four striking features. First and foremost, by collecting papers concerned with different aspects of discourse – discourse as text type, as social practice and as ideology – this volume supplies readers with an inclusive view of the meaning of discourse, and a wide panorama of discourse studies lies before us, ensuring a first-ever overview of concerns in the sphere of discourse studies, which makes it prominent in this research field. Second, the articles selected in this volume serve as models of successful integration of corpus methods into discourse analysis, making the findings convincing and insightful, while directing the orientation of cross-disciplinary studies, and this opens a new and wide prospect for the development of discourse analysis. Third, the corpora adopted in this book cover multiple registers and keep pace with the times by including spoken, written, multimodal and electronic data and touching themes such as dynamic visits, TV narratives, political speech, health, academic writing, news, social class, gender and ethnicity, thus suggesting the range of further discourse analysis should be widened and advanced. Last but not least, by combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, a systematic methodology needed in discourse research, a clear and overall picture of corpus-based discourse studies is presented, which is beneficial for better understanding.
This book is arranged in an accessible and logical way, and it deserves a wide readership. It is clearly structured and well placed to achieve its goal of showing how a corpus linguistic approach can be merged into various discourse analyses, making it a valuable contribution to current cross-disciplinary studies in language and communication. It can be recommended to faculty and to students who are interested in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.