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Description:
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Corpus, Culture and Discourse examines the ways in which people from
different cultures, writing in different languages and disciplines, use
language in an academic context. The study rests upon an approximately 1
million word parallel corpus of research articles from five humanities
disciplines, written by scholars from Great Britain, the United States and
Germany.The innovative methodology combines quantitative corpus and
statistical analyses with detailed qualitative analysis of the texts. The
study demonstrates that the synthesis of discourse analysis with corpus
linguistics - two traditionally-opposed approaches to the study of language
- is both practicable and rewarding, and can provide a powerful tool for
investigating linguistic behaviour.The study analyses academic discourse
with respect to its social, cultural, institutional and disciplinary
context. It sheds new light on the myriad ways in which academics use their
native language in research articles to construct and express social
identity, interact with their readers and the wider academic community, and
manage textual interaction through metadiscourse. The results show that
there are empirically verifiable, statistically significant differences
across cultures, languages and disciplines in the management of social
interaction in academic writing. Interestingly, it emerges that author age,
status and gender also exercise a significant influence on specific aspects
of language use.
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