This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.

Table of contents

List of Contributors Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström 1–13 I. Cohesion and Coherence 15 The Cataphoric Indexicality of Titles Annalisa Baichhi 17–38 Cataphoric Complexity in Spoken English Silvia Bruti 39–63 The Role of Multiple Themes in Cohesion Hilde Hasselgård 65–87 Dialogical coherence? Patterns of cohesion in face-to-face conversation and e-mail mailing list messages Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen 89–110 II. Metadiscourse and Discourse markers 111 Gestural and Symbolic Uses of the Deictic “here” in Academic Lectures Julia Bamford 113–138 The Discourse Function of Contrastive Connectors in Academic Abstracts Marina Bondi 139–156 The Discourse Functions of I don’t know in English Conversation Giuliana Diani 157–171 They’re a Little Bit Different… Observations on Hedges in Academic Talk Anna Mauranen 173–197 Interaction in Written Economics Lectures: The Meta-discursive Role of Person Markers Christina Samson 199–216 III. Text and Information Structure 217 Using Non-extraposition in Spoken and Written Texts: a Functional Perspective Gunther Kaltenboeck 219–242 IV. Metaphor and Text 243 English Metaphors and Their Translation: the Importance of Context Kay Wikberg 245–265