Book review: Charlotte Taylor and Anna Marchi (eds), Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review

Abstract

segmental boundaries that identified bursts of language production to determine how writing is produced in institutionally and socially constrained genres like social reports of at-risk children. This book makes a number of notable methodological contributions to the field of discourse analysis. Combining correspondence analysis with a bottom-up approach to stylometrics (Chapter 6) allows researchers to create detailed statistical comparisons of morpho-syntactic patterns within a text and for these comparisons to be represented visually to identify specific points of divergence or convergence. Although the full applications of such an approach are not explored in the volume, it does represent a promising methodology for quantifying qualitative features in discourse structures. The use of keystroke logging technology to capture text production, as demonstrated in Chapter 10, is another interesting methodological contribution of the volume as it allows for the analysis of real-time production of written language, making it less edited and perhaps more analogous to extemporaneous spoken language. This volume also adds to the growing body of literature in discourse and genre analysis on languages other than English, and while it remains largely focused on Romance languages, it is important to note that the methodologies and theoretical issues contained within the book are not raised from an English-centric perspective. Given that each chapter was written by a different set of authors, it is understandable that the accessibility of the authors’ writing styles would vary. Some chapters are denser in their use of jargon and specific terminology, which may make this book unsuitable as an introductory text to the field of genre analysis. As a whole, however, The Grammar of Genres and Styles makes a compelling and successful argument for the consideration of larger syntagmatic units in genre analysis. It can be recommended for linguists who are interested in register variation as a consideration for discourse analysis, as well as those who are interested in stylistics and literary analysis.