Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora

This text explains some of dominant discourse patterns in spoken and written corpora in English. It is very affordable. Are you interested in getting a copy of it? Then shoot us a message and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Discourse patterns in spoken and written corpora 

Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström Göteborg University / University of Bergen 

The purpose of the present volume is to bring together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. The papers are a selection of those presented in the Section Text and Discourse at the 5th ESSE Conference in Helsinki, 25th–29th August, 2000 with some added papers. The papers represent new trends in the area of text and discourse, characterised by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. Both text linguistics and discourse analysis are concerned with text. But, as Stubbs points out (1983: 9), the terms text and discourse require some comment since their use is confusing. There has been a tendency to use ‘text’ for the printed record and ‘discourse’ for spoken texts. This is re¶ected in the names of the two disciplines text linguistics and discourse analysis. However, it should be kept in mind that there is a great deal of overlap between the disciplines. Brown & Yule (1986: 3) for instance use ‘text’ as a technical term to refer to the verbal record of a communicative act whether spoken or written. Does the use of diŸerent terminology re¶ect diŸerent perspectives on the same area of research? Given the wide variety of approaches that are concerned with the analysis of text, what do these have in common? To begin with, it is necessary to look at the status and meaning of the terms text, discourse and function in modern linguistic theory. Background For the most part of the 20th century, linguists have been concerned with analysing sentences and with linguistic systems rather than the use of language. Chomsky set up as a goal for linguistics to describe the native speaker’s competence, i.e. the tacit knowledge of the abstract rules of language formalized as a component consisting of context-free rewrite rules and rules with transformational power. Made-up sentences were relied on and they hardly ever occurred in a context or cotext. In contrast, the study of discourse goes beyond the sentence and studies texts. As Stubbs (1983: 12) points out, there has been “a gathering consensus, particularly since the mid-1960s, that some of the basic assumptions of SaussereanBloomªeldean-Chomskyan linguistics must be questioned”. Such assumptions are for example that language should be studied for itself and that the highest unit of linguistic analysis is the sentence. Even during the heyday of Chomskyan linguistics, we ªnd ideas sharply opposed to those represented in generative grammar in the British linguistic tradition. The importance of text and functions of language in context had been stressed already by Firth (1957); it was inspired by Malinowski’s ‘context of culture’, and work on text and discourse has been taken further in the work by Halliday and by Sinclair. Halliday’s theory of language leans towards the functional: “The particular form taken by the grammatical system of language is closely related to the social and personal needs that language is required to serve” (Halliday 1970: 142). Another development, going against the Chomskyan assumption about the superiority of intuitive data, is the corpus-based research by Quirk, Leech, Svartvik and others. Text linguistics Historically, text linguistics and discourse analysis represent two diŸerent approaches to the study of text and discourse. In Textlinguistics one studies written texts. Much of the work undertaken is concerned with the text as a product ‘words on the page’ and not as a process (cf. Brown &Yule 1983: 24: the ‘text-as-product’ view). The term text linguistics usually refers to work done within a particular European tradition, represented for instance by van Dijk (1972) and by de Beaugrande (e.g. 1980). Linguists in this tradition turned to the text in order to cope with features which a sentence grammar could not handle, such as pronouns, ellipsis, etc. Typical of the text-linguistic approach is also the interest in coherence and cohesion. In Halliday and Hasan’s view (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 4), cohesion occurs “where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another”. Cohesion is, for instance, created by reference, repetition, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical organisation. Another view of text analysis is illustrated by Critical Discourse Analysis, a socially directed application of linguistic analysis. The goal is “to make mechanisms of manipulation, discrimination, prejudice, demagogy, and propaganda explicit and transparent” and to inquire not merely ‘how and why’ language barriers emerge and exist but also how they ‘might be altered or even overcome’ (Wodak 1990: 126; quoted from Asher 1994: 4576).