Douglas Biber

(Department of English, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ)

MERGING CORPUS LINGUISTIC AND DISCOURSE ANALYTIC RESEARCH GOALS: DISCOURSE UNITS IN BIOLOGY RESEARCH ARTICLES

Abstract

The present study addresses the following general question: Can the goals and methods of discourse analysis be reconciled with the goals and methods of large-scale corpus-based analysis? That is, is it possible to uncover generalizable patterns of discourse organization, based on detailed analysis of individual texts but at the same time based on analysis of all texts in a corpus?

The talk first briefly introduces two general approaches to this research problem: top-down and bottom-up analysis. Then, a particular framework for bottom-up corpus/discourse analysis is described, illustrated through an investigation of the patterns of discourse organization in a corpus of biology research articles:

-         First, each text in the corpus is segmented into vocabulary-based Discourse Units using computational techniques.

-         Second, analysis of all Discourse Units in the corpus is undertaken to identify the underlying Discourse Unit Types in biology research articles, based on their primary linguistic characteristics (using Multi-Dimensional analysis).

-         Third, the Discourse Unit Types are interpreted in functional terms.

-         Fourth, the analysis returns to the discourse organization of individual texts, analyzing their discourse structure as a consequence of Discourse Units, shifting among various Discourse Unit Types.

-         Finally, the preferred general patterns of discourse organization in this genre are identified and interpreted.