ABSTRACT
The notion of lexical cohesion is of central importance to the study of discourse. According to Thornbury, the optimal way of integrating corpus and discourse approaches is to combine computation and interpretation "in mutually informing cycles of investigation". As discourse analysis is a fundamentally interpretative activity based on qualitative analyses, supporting its findings with robust corpus statistics can add validity to claims about specialized types of language use. This chapter focuses on the use of corpora for exploring vocabulary at the level of discourse. It presents the benefits of combining corpus and discourse approaches for the purpose of analyzing the use of words and phrases. The chapter then discusses the importance of discourse-oriented corpus research for studying the role of lexical features in constructing and organizing discourse. It demonstrates how corpus techniques can assist in the analysis of pragmatic functions of vocabulary use.
