Book Review: Discourse on the Move: Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure by Douglas Biber, Ulla Connor, and Thomas A. Upton

By M. Santini. International Conference on Computational Logic, 2007

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/143a749428fc273124c8a1c51b42551c57479aed

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Citations in the corpus

Linguistic Obfuscation in Fraudulent Science (2016, background): “science community (Biber et al., 2007; Markowitz & Hancock, 2014), and these conventions do not allow for frequent use of first-person singular.”
A constructional account of genre-based argument omissions (2010, background): “As works like Biber (1995) and Biber et al. (2007) show, the linguistically relevant conception of genre is in many respects similar to that of register: a set of situational variables (like the relative social statuses of the interlocutors, the degree of formality of the communication and the…”
Metadiscursive nouns: Interaction and cohesion in abstract moves (2017, methodology): “To explore the rhetorical use of metadiscursive nouns in different moves, we adopted a topdown approach (Biber et al., 2007), first categorizing moves in terms of their communicative functions and then investigating the role of metadiscursive nouns in each move.”