This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Upton, T. A. Articles by Cohen, M. A. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

An approach to corpus-based discourse analysis: The move analysis as example

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PURDUE UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS, USA, tupton{at}iupui.edu

Mary Ann Cohen

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PURDUE UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS, USA, mdcohen{at}indy.rr.com

This article presents a seven-step corpus-based approach to discourse analysis that starts with a detailed analysis of each individual text in a corpus that can then be generalized across all texts of a corpus, providing a description of typical patterns of discourse organization that hold for the entire corpus. This approach is applied specifically to a methodology that is used to analyze texts in terms of the functional/communicative structures that typically make up texts in a genre: move analysis. The resulting corpus-based approach for conducting a move analysis significantly enhances the value of this often used (and misused) methodology, while at the same time providing badly needed guidelines for a methodology that lacks them. A corpus of ‘birthmother letters’ is used to illustrate the approach.

Key Words: birthmother letters • corpus linguistics • discourse analysis • move analysis

Discourse Studies, Vol. 11, No. 5, 585-605 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1461445609341006


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?