Constructions: a new unit of analysis for corpus-based discourse analysis

Abstract

We propose and assess the novel idea of using automatically induced constructions as a unit of analysis for corpus-based discourse analysis. Automated techniques are needed in order to elucidate important characteristics of corpora for social science research into topics, framing and argument structures. Compared with cur-rent techniques (keywords, n-grams, and collo-cations), constructions capture more linguistic patterning, including some grammatical phe-nomena. Recent advances in natural language processing mean that it is now feasible to auto-matically induce some constructions from large unannotated corpora. In order to assess how well constructions characterise the content of a corpus and how well they elucidate interesting aspects of different discourses, we analysed a corpus of climate change blogs. The utility of constructions for corpus-based discourse analy-sis was compared qualitatively with keywords, n-grams and collocations. We found that the unusually frequent constructions gave interest-ing and different insights into the content of the discourses and enabled better comparison of sub-corpora.