Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora

This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.

Anna-Maria De Cesare, University of Lausanne, in Studies in Language, Vol. 30:4 (2006):
Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora is a very interesting book. From a methodological perspective, it provides a wealth of useful information about how to use corpora to investigate languages and compare them. From a theoretical point of view, it presents different approaches to the 'text'. From a descriptive point of view, the book contains a good inventory and typology of typical textual forms [...] The book thus accomplishes its goal of presenting new ways of analyzing language and of uniting text linguistics and discourse analysis approaches. One can only wish for the publication of many more books that follow a similar approach and which extend its analytical possibilities to a variety of other languages.