ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on the research materials and methods. Two news treebanks are employed with one being a syntactic dependency treebank, and the other a discourse treebank which is converted into dependency treebank with mere terminal nodes. Both treebanks are from the same source material and thus render it possible for the author to carry out comparative studies at the syntactic and discourse levels. The research objects are separately defined for the two levels (Sections 4.4.2 and 4.4.3). At the syntactic level, seven combinations of the dependency structure, and valency and dependency distance (DD) are explored. At the discourse level, the study focuses on discourse relations, discourse valency and discourse DD. Two methods are adopted in this research: One is the language-in-the-mass method and the other is the language-in-the-line method. For the former, all the units/properties are put together without considering their linear features. For the latter, the order of units/properties is taken into consideration. Section 4.5 introduces two such linear linguistic units—motifs and sequencings.
