Bridging the gap between corpus tools and discourse analysis

This article examines how quantitative analyses typical of Corpus Linguistics can combine with more detailed qualitative analyses normally associated with Discourse Studies to provide valuable insights into discourse types. This dual approach, known as Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies, allows the researchers to manoeuvre between very large quantities of text while making systematic reference t o texual details which may otherwise be lost. The example of two large newspaper corpora is discussed.