Browsing by Subject "Belgians"

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    Using Computerized Corpus Analysis To Investigate The Textlinguistic Discourse Moves Of a Genre
    (Copyright © 2001 Elsevier[BREAK] The original doi for the as-published version of the article is 10.1016/S0889-4906(00)00022-3. To access the doi, open the following DOI site in your browser and cut and paste the doi name where indicated: [LINK]http://dx.doi.org[/LINK]. [BREAK] Access to the original article may require subscription and authorized logon ID/password. IUPUI faculty/staff/students please check University Library resources before purchasing an article. Questions on finding the original article via our databases? Ask a librarian: [LINK] http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/research/askalibrarian [/LINK]., 2001) Upton, Thomas A. (Thomas Albin); Connor, Ulla, 1948-
    Recently there has been a growing interest in and recognition of the value of specialized corpora, such as learner corpora [Granger, S. (1998). The computer learner corpus: a versatile new source of data for SLA research. In S. Granger, Learner English on computer (pp. 3–18). New York: Longman], in facilitating discourse analysis. Despite this trend, most corpus-based analyses have centered on the lexico–grammatical patterning of texts with less regard for functional and rhetorical, textlinguistic aspects [Flowerdew, L. (1998). Corpus linguistic techniques applied to textlinguistics. System, 26, 541–552]. The goals of this study were: (1) to demonstrate the efficacy of a multi-level analysis of a genre-specific learner corpus that included both a hand-tagged moves-analysis coupled with a computerized analysis of lexico-grammatical features of texts; and (2) to show how a pragmatic concept such as politeness can be operationalized to allow for computer generated counts of linguistic features related to that concept. In this study of politeness strategies used by Americans, Finns, and Belgians in a learner corpus of letters of application, we found that Americans as a group tended to be much more patterned, even formulaic, in their politeness strategies. The Belgians, on the other hand, showed more individuality in their letters with the Finns exhibiting both traits to lesser degrees. In this paper we argue for a textlinguistic approach that considers the special features of genre-specific corpora.