Volume 26, Issue 2

Discourse analysis or conversation analysis approaches audio or video data by way of transcription. It takes sentence or utterance as its point of departure, from which it moves up to discourse or conversation, or down to parts of a sentence or utterance. The present study departs from this mainstream paradigm by outlining and demonstrating a corpus linguistic approach to multimodal text analysis that starts from the analytic unit of social situation, to that of activity type, task/episode, and the participants’ behavior of talking and doing. The primary data consists of video streams with synchronized sounds rather than orthographic transcripts. The segmentation and annotation of nondiscrete streams of a multimodal text are demonstrated in accordance with the latest Text Encoding Initiative (TEI P4).

This paper investigates members’ practices at Drug and Therapeutic Committee (DTC) meetings. It describes situated practices involving textual and other forms of ‘evidence’ considered by committee members at two DTC sites dealing with the managed entry of a single pharmaceutical product (clopidogrel). It investigates the locally situated textual activities of committees and members; issues that evidence-based medicine (EBM) programs ignore in their assumption that decision-making can, and should, be a straightforward logical process involving the reading, understanding, and evaluation of scientific data unambiguously from a text. It describes the actual usage of written textual information by committees and individuals within them, as sophisticated reflexive workplace activities. Taking an ethnomethodological orientation, this paper shows how the same clinical study can result in different activities and discussions. This is not only because of different ‘readings’ by personnel in different places, at different times, and with different local concerns, but also due to the representational formats in which the study exists as a text document and object, i.e., that ‘evidence’ does not remain uniform across various sites.

Antonymy has always been regarded as a key lexical relation (see Leech 1974; Lyons 1977; or Cruse 1986). Recently, corpus data have allowed for the co-occurrence frequency of antonym pairs to be quantified and the various discourse functions of antonymy to be identified (e.g., Justeson and Katz 1991; Mettinger 1994; Fellbaum 1995; Jones 2002). The corpora upon which these studies were based all consisted exclusively of written language, so this paper addresses a question that has previously been overlooked: how are antonyms used in spoken language? Answers are provided using a corpus containing nearly ten million words of data, taken from the spoken component of the British National Corpus. A search for 56 antonym pairs is conducted, allowing a total of 955 contexts to be classified and analyzed. The distribution of discourse functions among these pairs is assessed, comparisons are made with the corresponding distribution in written language, and differences between antonym use across the two modes are identified and discussed. Evidence from the BNC indicates that antonym co-occurrence is 1.36 times more common in written language than spoken, but that the discourse functions of antonymy (and the frequency with which they are served) are relatively similar.

Using the A ppraisal framework developed by Martin (1996, 2000) and White (2005), this paper analyses the A ppraisal resources drawn on by one group of senior secondary school students in Australia when responding online to teacher prompts about a postmodernist narrative. A ppraisal analysis can reveal the extent to which affective, ethical, or critical stances are being negotiated in literature-based online discussions, and is used in this paper to examine how these evaluation resources are drawn on in a curriculum context where critical literary approaches are espoused. The analysis suggests that, while Australian students may be being provided with more postmodernist texts, and more flexible modes of negotiating meanings around those texts, they are still not yet able to take up those interpersonal positions that draw on knowledge of text construction either from a linguistic or a literary criticism perspective. The paper concludes by suggesting the value of A ppraisal analysis as a diagnostic tool in English/Language Arts curriculum in Australian and other cultural contexts.