Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis

Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at Lancaster University, UK.

Baker (Lancaster University, UK) looks at how corpora (computerized collections of naturally occurring language samples) can be used for discourse analysis. The book has four particular strengths. First, the author explains corpus methodologies thoroughly, including frequency and dispersion, concordances, collocates, and keyness. Second, the grounds his explanations in concrete analyses of discourse used in tourism brochures, fox-hunting debates, and news articles on refugees (among other texts), thereby offering exemplars of the methodology; included are several tabular examples of analysis. And fourth, he explores the strengths and limitations of corpus analysis, explaining the need for self-reflection with respect to methodological decision-making. An excellent guide to the scope and method of corpus linguistics as applied to discourse analysis, this book on research methods will be valuable to those in linguistics, rhetoric and communication, literary theory and other humanities fields.

• 1. Introduction2. Corpus Building 3. Frequency and Dispersion 4. Concordances5. Collates6. Beyond Collocation7. Keyness8. ConclusionBibliographyIndex