Research design in corpus-supported critical discourse analysis

Authors:

• Victoria Kamasa

Abstract

The usage of corpus linguistics for critical discourse analysis has become increasingly popular in the last decades. In this paper we use the perspective of research process design to present some general tendencies in corpus-supported critical discourse analysis on the basis of over 30 journal articles. We reconstruct the way CDA researchers who use corpus techniques deal with research design starting with research questions and nominal definition through operationalization and sampling and finishing with the presentation and interpretation of the results. The overview shows that the overall approach to use corpus methods in CDA remains very similar. It also reinforces the usefulness of study design description as both a tool for planning one's own research and an analytic instrument appropriate for observing the main empirical tendencies in a research field.