Corpus approaches to

discourse analysis

The Presenters

Andita Pribana Dewi (0800021) Annisa Aga (0807540) Dinnawaty Annisa P (0809076) Herlin Octaviani (0807535) Meike Triyurinda (0807534) Mufti Rizky Oktaviani (0801271) Sani Satya (0801270) Terra Patriana (0806398)

What is a Corpus?

Corpus collection of spoken or written authentic texts.

Corpus computer-readable and able to be accessed.

Kinds of corpora

1. General corpora[Reppen and Simpson 2004:95]E.g : collocate with girl and lady

2. Specialized CorporaA corpus of text of a particular type [Hunston 2002:14]The aim and function

3. The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE)

4. The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Relationship between lexical density and

speed in Academic lectures (NESI 2001)

5. The British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE)

6. The TOEFL Spoken and Written Academic Language CorpusThe aim of this corpus

Design and construction of corpora

Established corpora Make your own corpus

Issues to consider in constructing a corpus

Authenticity, representativeness and validity of the corpus

Kinds of texts to include in the corpus

Size of the texts in the corpus Sampling and representativeness of

the corpus

The Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus

Discourse types LSWE aim

Discourse Characteristic of Conversational English

LSEW Corpus the purposes

provide a grammar of

English

make important observation about

discourse

characteristics of conversational English

Characteristics of Conversational English

1. Non-clausal units in conversational discourse

2. Personal pronouns and ellipsis in conversation

3. Situational ellipsis in conversation4. Non-causal units as elliptic replies in

conversation5. Repetition in conversation6. Lexical bundles in conversational

discourse

Non-clausal Units in Conversational Discourse

• Non-clausal units utterances without an explicit S or V

• The characteristics : independent / self-standing have no grammatical connection

• Example:A: I love her so much.B: Fanny?A: Yeah …B: Why don’t you say it to her?A: It ‘s not easy, right?B: Why?

Non-clausal Units

Personal Pronouns and Ellipsis in Conversation

Makes wide use of personal pronouns and ellipsis

Shared context in conversation

Example:Marie : I hope you’re gonna put that

magazine down and give me a bit of hand in a minute.

John : (You want to me to give you a) Bit of a hand with what?

Situational Ellipsis in Conversation

Situational ellipsis may leaving out words of low informational value

Example:John: We’ve only got room for thirty people here,

maximum, so if you’ve invited thirty-seven and they’re all going to being friends, we haven’t got enough room, have we? Common sense

John: If you wanna have a party here, forty people is the limit. simple as that in conversation

Non-causal Units as Elliptic Replies in

Conversation Often occur in conversational discourse To make the conversation shorter and

simpler Example:

A: I’m gonna stay in Jakarta for 2 months.B: why?

(Why do you stay in Jakarta for 2 months?)

Repetition in Conversation

Purposes to give added emphasis to a point in a conversation

Example: Repetition to give emphasis in agreement conversation

A: We have no more assignment, I think.B: No, we have one more assignment.C: No, we have more than one assignment. A: Really?C: Yes, we have more than one assignment.

Lexical Bundles in Conversational

Discourse Lexical Bundles formulaic mutli-word

sequences such as, It’s going to be, If you want to, You know, etc.

Example:E: Perhaps, we should do it know. Ummm, you know, it would takes two or three hours.

Performance and phenomena of conversational discourse

Silent and filled pauses in conversationexample :

Marie : You are being .... A sixteen-year-old twit. Sit down and write down your guests

Utterance launcers and filled pausesexample :Ryan : And... Can I have your phone number too, so I can

call you tonight?

Jono : How does his new girlfriend looks, is she pretty?Maria : Well, at least she is better than the previous one,

she is stylish.Jono : Right,a metrosexual man like James must have a

stylish girlfriend.

Attention signals in conversation Example : Meike : John? John : yeah what?

Response elicitors in conversation Example : Marry : I’ve heard that you are an HIV AIDS

sufferer, is that true?

James : A bedroom with a sweet pink painted wall. Who do you think I am Mum? A girl?

Non Clausal items as response forms Example : Marie : The DJ, why d’you have to have a

DJ? What does he do? Just plays records all night?

Ryan : Yeah.

Extended co-ordination of clauses Example : Ryan : we’ll leave the gate open. We’ll

leave the pontoon there, and you’ll see just see. You...think I’m so stupid. But if you...look around and open your eyes, you’ll see.

Constructional principles of conversational

discourse There are three key principles in the

production of conversational discourse1. Keep talking2. Limited planning ahead3. Qualification of what has been said

 

Prefaces in conversation an uterance which connects what they have to say to the previous utterances as well as giving the speaker time to plan what they will say next. e.g. The DJ, why d’you have to have a DJ? 

Tags in conversation Speakers add tags in many ways as an afterthought to a grammatical unit in conversational discourse. e.g.

1.)Marie: Well, there’s not going to be any trouble.

John: Well, Ryan seems to think there is. Ryan: Oh yeah, there’s gonna be gang

warfare in my backyard, is there?

  2.) You can cut it now, right this minute.

 

Corpus Studies of the Social Nature of

Discourse Consider discourse means in wider

social terms. Using MICASE corpus. Study of the generic structure of

second language taken from students’ dissertation acknowledgements. (Hyland, 2004)

Collocation and corpus studies

Corpus studies have also been used to examine collocations in spoken and written disourse.

Hyland and Tse’s (2004) study of dissertation acknowledgements:They found:Collocation of SPECIAL THANKS then followed by SINCERE THANKS AND DEEP THANKSThey found it by searching their corpus to see how the writers typically expressed gratitude.

Then, what items typically occur to the left of the item ‘thanks’.

Ooi (2001) carried out a corpus based-study of the language of personal ads on Internet sites in the US and in Singapore. He used the concordance program WordSmith Tool to examine word frequency and lexical and grammatical collocations in his example texts.

He found: many US writes used the terms ‘attractive’ and ‘great’ as descriptive devices while Singaporean writers largely did not.The verb ‘looking for’ commonly collocated with the writer’s ‘hope and dream’.

Bruthiaux (1994) carried out a corpus based-study of the language of ads in personal columns in the LA Weekly.

He found:The writers frequently used personal chaining and hyphenated items in personal advertisements strings of adjectives and nouns.Personal chaining : artistic, athletic, adorable 20-30 year oldhyphenated items: good-looking

Personal chaining

hyphenated items

Man or Woman

Collocate with

- The high use of Conventionalized abbreviations such as SAM for single Asian Male, SWF for Single White Female

Criticisms of Corpus Studies

Flowerdew (2005) provides a summary of criticisms. Some of them:

Computer-based orientation of corpus studies leads to atomized, bottom-up investigations of language use

Corpus studies do not take account of contextual aspects of texts

Meanwhile, Tribble (2002) argues that understanding language use includes understanding social and contextual knowledge, not just knowledge of the language system.

Contextual analysis Linguistics analysisNameSocial contextCommunicative purposeRoleCultural valuesText contextFormal text features

Lexico-grammatical featuresText relations/ textual patterningText structure

One way of gaining contextual information for an analysis is by the use of interviews and focus group discussions with users. The analysis can also be combined with other contextual information available on the data and other information that is available on the data.

A further approach is to read more widely on the topic of the discourse.

For what?

To help offset the argument that corpus studies are decontextualized and only of interest at the item, rather than the discourse level.