Extract

Abstract: The usage of corpus linguistics for critical discourse analysis has become increasingly popular in the last decades. In this paper we use the perspective of research process design to present some general tendencies in corpus-supported critical discourse analysis on the basis of over 30 journal articles. We reconstruct the way CDA researchers who use corpus techniques deal with research design starting with research questions and nominal definition through operationalization and sampling and finishing with the presentation and interpretation of the results. The overview shows that the overall approach to use corpus methods in CDA remains very similar. It also reinforces the usefulness of study design description as both a tool for planning one’s own research and an analytic instrument appropriate for observing the main empirical tendencies in a research field.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse studies, corpus linguistics, research design, concordances, collocates, keywords.

1. Introduction

The usage of corpus linguistics (CL) for critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become increasingly popular in the last decades. According to the Scopus database, the total number of publications using this approach in 1990’s came to 3, in 2000’s it was 29, and since 2010 it has already reached 471. This tendency is also visible in the leading conferences in the field: during the 2014 Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Among Disciplines (CADAAD) conference almost 40 authors used some form of corpus analysis in their studies. Theoretical reflection on the use of CL in CDA...