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Corpus Analysis

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Methodology in Politeness Research

Part of the book series: Advances in (Im)politeness Studies ((AIMS))

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Abstract

A corpus is a reasoned and pondered collection of texts of any nature that can be analysed on paper or in audio–video or digital form. It becomes data when it is accessed with a research objective. A digital corpus offers an empirical basis with automated access, but as Clark (Methods in Pragmatics. Mouton De Gruyter, 2018) points out, this does not exempt the analyst from the use of intuition. This chapter focuses on corpora, and outlines examples of recent studies in politeness research. These show how a corpus is a tool for sharpening intuitions, that is, an adjuvant which does not exempt the analyst from kee** a clear position with respect to the data she is going to analyse. The corpus analysis is somehow an evolution of the philological method, which is a method of data collection with ancient origins that consists of sifting through many texts to scour for occurrences of the linguistic structures under analysis. Nowadays, this time-consuming process is digitally supported by storage of texts, data retrieval and statistical analysis.

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  1. Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazioni, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Elena Landone

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  1. Elena Landone
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Correspondence to Elena Landone .

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Landone, E. (2022). Corpus Analysis. In: Methodology in Politeness Research. Advances in (Im)politeness Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_19

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-09161-2

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