Merging corpus linguistic and discourse analytic research goals: Discourse units in biology research articles

Abstract

The present study introduces a research approach that combines corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytic perspectives to analyze the discourse patterns in a large corpus of biology research articles. The primary goals of the study are to identify vocabulary-based Discourse Units (DUs) using computational techniques, to describe the basic types of DUs in biology research articles as distinguished by their primary linguistic characteristics (using Multi-Dimensional analysis), to interpret those Discourse Unit Types in functional terms, and to then illustrate how the internal organization of a text can be described as a sequence of DUs, shifting among various Discourse Unit Types.