Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

CHAPTER 5. Corpus creation and methodology
5.1. Introduction: Summary of this chapter
This chapter presents the corpus compilation and the research methodology of the current
research. The chapter begins by introducing what sorts of decisions are made in the corpus
creation of two academic disciplines, focusing in particular on the issues of corpus
representativeness and corpus size. Then, I will describe the methodology adopted in the
current study in detail.
5.2. Corpus creation
It is becoming increasingly standard practice for academic discourse researchers to adopt a
broadly corpus-based approach to the linguistic study of particular disciplines. This is because
corpora aid us to quantitatively observe , how linguistic items (e.g.
vocabulary, collocations, patterns) typically occur in a particular discourse (Gavioli & Aston,
2001; Christie, 1999; Conrad, 2000: Lewis, 2000). In this sense, corpus-based study may
reveal the linguistic norms and cultural values peculiar to a particular discipline. For these
reasons, I compile and analyse corpora peculiar to specific disciplines in the current study.
5.2.1. Corpus representativeness and size
One of the most intractable and controversial questions in corpus linguistics concerns whether
and to what extent any corpus can be said to be representative of a particular language variety.
As Kennedy (1998, p. 52) suggests, [w]e cannot be confident we know all the possible text
types nor their proportions of u
uses the word approximation, implying the idea about the imperfectness of representativeness
for a language in the corpus compilation; this is not exceptional, even for a specific discipline.
Therefore, the current study attempts to compile disciplinary specific corpora by
approximating the representativeness of each discipline as much as possible based on several
standards.
As Hunston (2002a, p. 26) points out,
In this sense, a
specialized corpus is still more reliable than a general reference corpus regarding the matter of
representativeness and thus need not to be as large as the general reference corpus, if the
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