Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis

Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis explores applications of rhetorically informed approaches to corpus research. Bringing together contributions from scholars in a variety of fields, it takes up questions of how theories and traditions in rhetorical analysis can be integrated with corpus techniques in order to enrich our understanding of language use, variation, and history. The studies included in this volume shed light on areas as diverse as student academic writing, political discourse, and the digital humanities. These studies all make use of a dictionary-based tagger called DocuScope, which recognizes tens-of-millions of words and phrases and slots them into categories based on their rhetorical functions. While DocuScope provides a through-line that both links the studies’ various analytical procedures and primes their rhetorical insights, the volume is about more than the explanatory power of a single tool. It demonstrates how rhetorically informed approaches can complement more established corpus methodologies, underscoring their combined potential.