ABSTRACT
The chapter describes the affinity between corpus linguistics and the study of media discourse. Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) allow for a constant shunting between the big picture (e.g. keywords and collocational patterns) and detail (e.g. close reading of concordances and texts), as well as encouraging attention towards the extra-linguistic context, such as aspects of journalistic production and the public’s reception, hence the natural match between CADS and the study of journalism. The chapter discusses what has been done with newspaper corpora, what can be done with them and the challenges and limitation of text-only approaches. Great relevance is given aspects of research design, which are often taken for granted, in particular to corpus compilation and to methodological considerations on the impact of the research process on the analysis.
