ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the triangulation of two text segmentation methods (manual and automatic) and two analytical approaches to text analysis (qualitative and quantitative) with the goal of analyzing a corpus of monologic academic lectures for their discourse structure. The first approach to both segmentation and analysis (manual segmentation and qualitative functional coding) relies primarily on meaning (e.g. content, context, and coherence) in arriving at conclusions about text structure. The second approach (automatic segmentation and quantitative analysis) considers linguistic features (e.g. lexical items), their frequency, and their distribution throughout texts in order to investigate text structure. Our goal in this chapter is to investigate the extent to which results from these two methodologies complement each other in contributing to our understanding of the structure of monologic academic lectures.
