ABSTRACT
One of the main concerns regarding corpus-based analyses is their lack of contextual features for interpretation of the corpus data. As Hunston (2002: 23) notes in her discussion of the limitations of a corpus, ‘Perhaps most seriously a corpus presents language out of its context.’ However, in recent years, more importance has been attached to the value of contextual features to aid corpus analysis, especially for those analyses of small, specialized corpora where the compiler-cum-analyst has access to valuable background information for interpretation of the data (see Flowerdew 2004a for an overview of such studies). In this respect, Tribble (2002) outlines an analytic framework for contextual analysis of corpus data, which he describes as derived from a synthesis of the three main approaches to genre (Swalesian, Australian systemic-functional linguistic, and the new rhetoric), to complement the linguistic analysis (see Table 8.1). Tribble’s position, then, is to see the role of context as very much informing corpus-based analyses.
