ABSTRACT
By most accounts, the fi eld of ‘corpus-based approaches to discourse analysis’ would seem to have a rather slim bibliography: an informal, small-scale survey of opinion that I conducted in March 2005 among several corpus-based linguists1 revealed a consensus of opinion that was surprising in its unanimity: the experts agreed that very little discourse analytic work had been done by corpus linguists2 (even with ‘discourse analysis’ deliberately left vague and undefi ned in my survey question). From a complementary perspective, most discourse analysts would probably agree that few research studies in their fi eld have been based extensively on computerized text databases. One reason could be that a lot of discourse analysts focus on spoken language, and there are not many corpora of spoken English available (or those that are do not meet analysts’ requirements). However, discourse analysis (DA) is certainly not exclusively restricted to spoken texts, so there must be other reasons for this scarcity of corpus-based discourse studies. One reason, of course, is that the ‘corporist’ approach is a relative newcomer to the scene and has yet to make its mark. The seeming lack of work in corpus-based discourse analysis (henceforth CBDA) is surprising, given Kirk’s (1996) summary, more than a decade ago, of the work that had been done up until then. His personal comment at that time was that:
Corpus linguistics and discourse analysis have been good partners, not least because they tend to have come from the same stables, e.g., Birmingham, Lund, and Santa Barbara. Exhaustive discourse analyses
of entire spoken corpora as well as quantifi ed results would make them ever better partners.
