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

The study of discourse can be undertaken from different perspectives (e.g., linguistic, cognitive, or computational) with differing purposes in mind (e.g., to study language use or to analyze social practices). The aim of Discourse on the Move is to show that it is possible and profitable to join quantitative and qualitative analyses to study discourse structures. Whereas corpus-based quantitative discourse analysis focuses on the distributional discourse patterns of a corpus as a whole with no indication of how patterns are distributed in individual texts, manual qualitative analysis is always carried out on a small number of texts and does not support large generalizations of the findings. The book proposes two methodological approaches—top-down and bottomup—that combine the quantitative and qualitative views into a corpus-based description of discourse organization. Such a description provides detailed analyses of individual texts and the generalization of these analyses across all the texts of a genre-specific corpus. Top-down is the more traditional (not necessarily corpus-based) approach in which researchers establish functional–qualitative methods to develop an analytical framework capable of describing the types of discourse units in a target corpus. In this approach, linguistic–quantitative analyses come as a later step to facilitate the interpretation of discourse types. In contrast, the bottom-up approach begins with a linguistic– quantitative analysis based on the automatic segmentation of texts into discourse units on the basis of vocabulary distributional patterns. In this approach, the functional– qualitative analysis that provides an interpretation of the discourse types is performed as a later step. Both top-down and bottom-up analyses can be broken down into seven procedural steps, but the order of the steps in the two approaches is not the same. The steps to be followed in top-down methods are these: