Upton, Thomas A. (Thomas Albin)Cohen, Mary Ann2010-12-092010-12-092009-10Upton, Thomas A. and Mary Ann Cohen, "An approach to corpus-based discourse analysis: The move analysis as example." Discourse Studies 11, no. 5 (October 2009): 585–605.Upton, Thomas A. and Mary Ann Cohen, "An approach to corpus-based discourse analysis: The move analysis as example." December 9, 2010. Available from IUPUI ScholarWorks. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/2332.1461-4456https://hdl.handle.net/1805/2332This post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of the article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project. Article reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Permission granted through posted policies on copyright owner’s website or through direct contact with copyright owner.This article presents a seven-step corpus-based approach to discourse analysis that starts with a detailed analysis of each individual text in a corpus that can then be generalized across all texts of a corpus, providing a description of typical patterns of discourse organization that hold for the entire corpus. This approach is applied specifically to a methodology that is used to analyze texts in terms of the functional/communicative structures that typically make up texts in a genre: move analysis. The resulting corpus-based approach for conducting a move analysis significantly enhances the value of this often used (and misused) methodology, while at the same time providing badly needed guidelines for a methodology that lacks them. A corpus of ‘birthmother letters’ is used to illustrate the approach.en-USBirthmother LettersCorpus LinguisticsDiscourse AnalysisMove AnalysisBirthmothersLettersCorpora (Linguistics)Linguistic analysis (Linguistics)Corpus and discourse. Research in corpus and discourseLinguistics -- ResearchArticle