Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis studies the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used. It includes different disciplines like linguistics, psychology, sociology, and sociolinguistics. The language studied is the one in use: written texts and describes the language above the level of the sentence/utterance spoken data of all kinds.

Key focus of discourse analysis

Discourse analysis essentially asks why we use language the way we do. Making the distinction between whether a person is described as a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘freedom fighter’ is something DA would look at, whilst considering the implications of each term. To expand, 'terrorist' is a term that brings negative connotations of evil and violence, whereas 'freedom fighter' has positive connotations of fighting towards political upheaval of dictatorships. So, one term is looked upon a lot more favorably than the other, and this is what a discourse analyst would consider, as well as looking at the relationship of these terms with a widely used term such as ‘Muslim’.

Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a research framework in the humanities and the social sciences which focuses on the relation between discourse and social practices, ideology, and beliefs and aims at uncovering the ideological underpinnings behind text representations. CDA can be used to analyze texts covering a wide range of topics, for example: racism, sexism, homophobia, politics, immigration, crime, and many more.

Corpus linguistics

A “Corpus” is a large collection of texts which have been stored in machine-readable form and can be studied using various computer programs in the branch of linguistics known as “corpus linguistics”. Two of the most known corpora are the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC). Corpora can contain both full or sampled texts, the BNC contains both.

Studying a corpus

The most usual way of studying a corpus is by using a concordancing program which enables to study a word form by looking at a large number of citations in its linguistic context. The data is generally presented in Key Word in Context format (KWIC). Concordances can be sorted in various ways and it is possible to restrict the search to a particular part of speech. Corpus work can be corpus-based or corpus-driven. Corpus-based research starts with existing paradigms while corpus-driven research makes no assumptions of what will be found, allowing new categories to emerge from the study. In researching metaphors through a corpus, a concordance will show the linguistic context in which the lexical item is used but this information then has to... (text cuts off)