What can a corpus tell us about specialist genres?

Abstract

Many of the criticisms within applied linguistics are concerned with the following three areas: Corpus data are decontextualised data, Corpora require a bottom-up approach and Corpora are quantitative, number-crunching tools. There are several reasons why smaller corpora are more suited for studying specialist genres. This chapter shows how a specialised genre approach, as opposed to one utilizing general corpora, can practically address these concerns. Further work on spoken academic genres, as well as other speech genres, has been conducted on Nottingham's CANCODE corpus. The chapter looks at Koester's work on spoken workplace communication. Service encounters are essentially transactional genres, but they often contain a lot of interpersonal discourse. The chapter has provided a flavour of the combination of genre and corpus approaches, and shown how corpora of specialised genres can answer many of the criticisms levelled at corpus linguistics. Fairclough’s keyword-based study of political language is one example of how such insights can be produced.

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