Genre Analysis And Corpus Design

This work in the field of digital literary stylistics and computational literary studies is concerned with theoretical concerns of literary genre, with the design of a corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels, and with its empirical analysis in terms of subgenres of the novel. The digital text corpus consists of 256 Argentine, Cuban, and Mexican novels from the period between 1830 and 1910. It has been created with the goal to analyze thematic subgenres and literary currents that were represented in numerous novels in the nineteenth century by means of computational text categorization methods. To categorize the texts, statistical classification and a family resemblance analysis relying on network analysis are used with the aim to examine how the subgenres, which are understood as communicative, conventional phenomena, can be captured on the stylistic, textual level of the novels that participate in them.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics provides a timely overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Through the electronic analysis of large bodies of text, corpus linguistics demonstrates and supports linguistic statements and assumptions. In recent years it has seen an ever-widening application in a variety of fields: computational linguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, pragmatics and translation studies. Bringing together experts in the key areas of development and change, the handbook is structured around six themes which take the reader through building and designing a corpus to using a corpus to study literature and translation. A comprehensive introduction covers the historical development of the field and its growing influence and application in other areas. Structured around five headings for ease of reference, each contribution includes further reading sections with three to five key texts highlighted and annotated to facilitate further exploration of the topics. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics is the ideal resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates.

Genre analysis has become firmly established as one of the most popular frameworks for the study of specialized genres in academic, professional and institutional as well as other workplace contexts. In recent years, genre theory has also developed in the direction of a more comprehensive and powerful multi-dimensional and multi-perspectived framework to examine not only the text but also the context in a much more meaningful manner than had ever been done earlier. The theoretical perspectives and the individual case studies of this volume testify to the wide range of methodological tools made available by genre theory, enabling researchers to handle problems relating to the description of variations in language use. Moreover, the following relevant issues are addressed: how are specialized genres constructed, interpreted and exploited in the achievement of specific goals in highly specialized contexts?

This collection is a comprehensive resource on conducting research in applied linguistics involving written genres that is distinctive in its coverage of a multiplicity of interdisciplinary perspectives. The volume explores the central approaches, methodologies, analyses, and tools used in conducting genre-based research, extending the traditional focus on a single framework for defining genres by explicating the major approaches that have been invoked in applied linguistics. Chapters address a mix of commonly used methodologies (e.g., case studies, ethnographic approaches), types of analyses (e.g., metadiscourse, rhetorical move-step analysis, multidimensional analysis, lexical bundles and phrase frames, CALF measures, multimodal analysis), and studies that focus on other areas of second language (L2) teaching and learning (e.g., multilingualism, the Teaching and Learning Cycle). Taken together, the volume provides a theoretically and methodologically diverse introduction to foundational topics in genre-related research, supported by detailed discussions of the challenges and practical considerations to take into account when conducting research involving written genres. This book is a valuable resource for graduate students, faculty, and researchers in applied linguistics, particularly those working in second language acquisition, L2 writing, and genre theory and pedagogy.

This book is about the design of a Setswana corpus for lexicography. While various corpora have been compiled and a variety of corpora-based research has been attempted in African languages, no effort has been made towards corpus design. Additionally, although extensive analysis of the Setswana language has been done by missionaries, grammarians and linguists since the 1800s, none of this research is in corpus design. Most research has been largely on the grammatical study of the language. The recent corpora research in African languages in general has been on the use of corpora for the compilation of dictionaries and little of it is in corpus design. Pioneers of this kind of corpora research in African languages are Prinsloo and De Schryver (1999), De Schryver and Prisloo (2000 and 2001) and Gouws and Prisloo (2005). Because of a lack of research in corpora design particularly in African languages, this book attempts to fill that gap, especially for Setswana. It is hoped that the finding of this study will inspire similar designs in other languages comparable to Setswana. We explore corpus design by focusing on measuring a variety of text types for lexical richness at comparable token points. The study explores the question of whether a corpus compiled for lexicography must comprise a variety of texts drawn from different text types or whether the quality of retrieved information for lexicographic purposes from a corpus comprising diverse text varieties could be equally extracted from a corpus with a single text type. This study therefore determines whether linguistic variability is crucial in corpus design for lexicography.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

This volume introduces a new framework for conceptualizing and achieving corpus representativeness in a rigorous, yet practical way.