4 - Analyzing a Corpus

Summary

This chapter describes the process of analyzing a corpus. It discusses the general notions of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies within the context of various types of corpus analyses, including Biber’s work on multi-dimensional analysis as well as a more qualitative analysis of Donald Trump’s style of speaking termed Trump Speak. These analyses are used to illustrate the various stages of doing research in general, and corpus-based research specifically. For instance, the analysis of Trump Speak is linked to a discussion of “how to frame a research question"; “how to select relevant corpora that can be analyzed to pursue the research question"; “how to ‘extract’ grammatical and lexical information from a corpus,” using such tools as concordancing programs; and, finally, how to “integrate relevant linguistic theories into the analysis of corpus results,” so that the research does more than simply list, for instance, frequency counts. There is also a discussion of “mixed methods”: how to introduce quantitative and qualitative research methods into a corpus analysis, followed by an example corpus analysis employing descriptive statistics such as the chi square statistic, and additionally, a description of multi-dimensional analysis in the work of Douglas Biber.