Abstract
This working paper presents the progress made thus far in the development of a corpus-lexicographical approach to discourse analysis, more specifically the application of Hanks’ Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) procedure to a (critical) discourse analysis task. The theoretical basis of CPA is explained, followed by some practical applications of CPA, namely lexicography and the proposed method of discourse analysis. Examples are taken from an ongoing investigation into the use of ‘killing’ verbs in contemporary British English, which draws upon two corpora: the British National Corpus (BNC) and the animal-themed ‘People’, 'Products’,‘ Pests’ and ‘Pets’ (PPPP) corpus. Preliminary findings suggest that a CPA-assisted, or corpus-lexicographical, discourse analysis is one with a strong theoretical basis, whose transparency and systematicity empowers the analyst to make precise and persuasive arguments.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of EUROPHRAS 2017 |
| Publication status | Published (VoR) - 2017 |