System and Corpus - Exploring Connections - Geoff Thompson †
From concordance to text: appraising ‘giving’ in Alma Mater donation requests
System and Corpus - Exploring Connections - Geoff Thompson †
Donna R. Miller [+]
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
Description
This paper aims to explore the issues involved in the discourse analyst’s search for correlations between meaning and expression across a corpus of texts and in the contemporaneous, not uncommon, finding that there is just so much, with reference to such questions, that the concordance line can tell us.1 More specifically, it will investigate the value of the multidirectional descriptive method of ‘shunting’ (Halliday 1961, in 2002: 45), in this case from a lowerlevel corpus analysis to a complementary higher-level, ‘text-collection’ analysis, illustrating the method by examining a small corpus of donation requests from one’s Alma Mater