A Study on the Methodology of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Methodologically, corpus linguistics is frequently criticised for its tendency to disregard context, while the major criticism of CDA(critical dicourse analysis) is its arbitrariness in selecting texts to be analysed. Combining the two approaches can offer a way to overcome the weaknesses of each method and enhance analytical rigour. In this paper, collocational analysis, cluster analysis, and concordance analysis are applied to the corpus of newspaper articles on distribution. The collocational and cluster analyses are effective for processing a large amount of data and extracting recurring patterns in which specific words are used. They further provide the starting point of the concordance analysis, which allows a qualitative look into the context that is difficult to observe in the collocational analysis. The combined methodology has proven to be useful in revealing the intention of the usage of specific words or phrases, and shown how corpus analysis can contribute to discourse analysis.