Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora (review)

Up to now the text and discourse dimensions have been comparatively neglected in corpus linguistic research. The present collection of twelve papers can be seen as a response to this research desideratum. In their introduction, Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström review traditional approaches to, as well as recent trends in, the study of text and discourse and define the scope of the volume. They cover the interrelated fields of genre analysis, academic discourse, cohesion, deixis, metaphor, evaluation, and contrastive analysis.

‘Cohesion and coherence’, the first of the book’s four thematic sections, deals with expressions of cohesion and coherence in speech and writing. The papers by Annalisa Baicchi and Silvia Bruti relate to a project on text complexity and discuss forms and functions of cataphoric reference in spontaneous spoken conversation (Bruti) and in book titles and headlines (Baicchi). Using data from a parallel and a multilingual corpus of English, Norwegian, and German texts, Hilde Hasselgård, in ‘The role of multiple themes in cohesion’, explores themes that contain more than one textual, interpersonal, or experiential constituent. In the last paper in this section, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen investigates patterns of cohesion in face-to-face conversation (data from different BrE corpora) and in e-mail mailing-list messages, and identifies parallels between written and spoken dyadic dialogue.

The five contributions in Part 2 of the volume are concerned with ‘Metadiscourse and discourse markers’ in different text types. Julia Bamford and Anna Mauranen both use corpora of academic spoken English (lectures and conversations) to shed light on textual microfeatures, in particular deictic terms (Bamford) and hedges (Mauranen). Marina Bondi analyzes the use of contrastive connectors, such as however or but, in academic writing. Bondi nicely shows that academic disciplines (here economics, history, and sociology) exhibit differences in their typical discursive procedures and in expressions of evaluative meaning. Guiliana Diani then takes a closer look at the discourse marker I don’t know in conversational exchanges, taking into account its semantics and the pragmatic functions enhanced by its typical co-selection patterns. This part of the collection concludes with Christina Samson’s discussion of how writers of economics lectures employ the person markers we and I to express their personal stance and to get the reader involved.

The last two thematic sections, ‘Text and information structure’ and ‘Metaphor and text’, contain one paper each. Gunther Kaltenböck elucidates the functional properties of nonextrapositions in ICE-GB (a corpus of spoken and written BrE), focusing on the communicative properties of such constructions in contrast to it-extrapositions. The final contribution, by Kay Wikberg, takes a corpus approach to ‘English metaphors and their translation’ into Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish, and discusses the role of (multilingual) corpora in metaphor research.

This volume certainly identifies corpora as powerful tools in text and discourse analysis, and also raises new questions on different types of text in context. It provides fresh insights into the patterning of discourse features in relation to register, genre, and discourse community.