Aims
The aim of the CADS approach is the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of non-obvious meaning, that is, meaning which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal. Much of what carries meaning in texts is not open to direct observation: “you cannot understand the world just by looking at it” (Stubbs 1996: 92). We use language “semi-automatically”, in the sense that speakers and writers make semi-conscious choices within the various complex overlapping systems of which language is composed, including those of transitivity, modality (Michael Halliday 1994), lexical sets (e.g. freedom, liberty, deliverance), modification, and so on. Authors themselves are, famously, generally unaware of all the meanings their texts convey. By combining the quantitative research approach, that is, statistical overviews of large amounts of the discourse in question - more precisely, large numbers of tokens of the discourse type under study contained in a corpus - with the more qualitative research approach typical of discourse analysis, that is, the close, detailed examination of particular stretches of discourse it may be possible to better understand the processes at play in the discourse type and to gain access to non-obvious meanings.
Read more about this topic: Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies
Famous quotes containing the word aims:
“All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)
“But, with whatever exception, it is still true that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory, and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is necessary and eternal; that thus historical Christianity destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the moral nature of man; where the sublime is, where are the resources of astonishment and power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“...a fixed aim furnishes us with a fixed measure, by which we can decide whether such or such an action proposed is worth trying for or not, and as aims must vary with the individual, the decisions of any two people as to the desirableness of an action may not be the same.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)