Introducing Corpus-Based Discourse Studies

Introducing Corpus-based Discourse Studies explores how large collections of texts can be used to investigate the ways language represents people, events, identities, and relations of power. This is the first systematic textbook to offer a complete, methodologically unified framework suitable for both teaching and research. The author integrates key traditions—including Foucault's discursive formations, Fairclough's model of discourse as social practice, and the Discourse-Historical Approach—providing a theoretically grounded and methodologically hands-on pathway for analyzing text, context, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and discursive change. The textbook introduces core techniques including frequency, keyness, dispersion, collocation, and concordance analysis, then shows how they illuminate agency, social actors, metaphor, argumentation, legitimation, blame avoidance, and narrative. It connects numerical patterns with close reading and wider social and historical context, making clear both what corpus evidence can reveal and where interpretation requires caution. Examples range across political, media, and cultural discourse in Europe and beyond, from British newspaper reporting on migration between 2014 and 2023 to changing ideas of film as a language from the 1920s to the 1950s. Practical tasks, detailed examples, visualizations, and research templates guide readers through complete projects. The book develops innovative ways of tracing recurring arguments and narrative structures across large datasets, offering a rigorous, transparent framework for studying discourse over time. With step-by-step demonstrations, sample corpora, walkthroughs of corpus tools, and applied examples from media, political communication, institutional discourse, and social movements, this textbook bridges qualitative interpretation and quantitative linguistic evidence. Ideal for researchers and advanced students in thr field of humanities and social sciences, it fills a critical gap between introductory discourse analysis texts and specialized corpus-linguistic manuals.