Research Questions and Techniques of Analysis
CADS research projects often focus on research questions of the following types:
Given that P is a discourse participant (or possibly an institution) and G is a goal, often a political goal:
(i) How does P achieve G with language?
(ii) What does this tell us about P?
(iii) Comparative studies: how do P1 and P2 differ in their use of language? Does this tell us anything about their different principles and objectives?
A second general type of CADS research question, which might be asked of interactive discourse data, is the following.
Given that P(x) is a particular participant or set of participants, DT is the discourse type, and R is an observed relationship between or among participants:
How do {P(a), P(b)…P(n)} achieve / maintain R in DT ?
Another common type of research question open to investigation using CADS techniques is the following:
Given that A is an author, Ph(x) is a phenomenon or practice or behaviour, and DT(x) is a particular discourse type.
A has said P(x) is the case in DT(a)
Is Ph(x) the case in DT(b)
This is a classic “hypothesis-testing” research question: we test the hypothesis that whatever practice has been observed by a previous author in some discourse type will be observable in another. It is a process we might call para-replication, that is, the replication of an experiment with either a fresh set of texts of the same discourse type or of a related discourse type, “in order to see whether were an artefact of one single data set” (Stubbs 2001: 124).
A final example of research question which may usefully be investigated using CADS techniques is of the following sort.
Given that P(x) is a participant or category thereof, and LF(x) is a particular language feature:
Do {P(a)} and {P(b)} use LF(x) in the same way?
Such research aims to ascertain whether different participants use a particular linguistic feature in the same or different ways. The research may proceed to attempt to explain why this is the case.
Read more about this topic: Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies
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