Tamsin Sanderson

Corpus, Culture, Discourse Tamsin Sanderson

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.