Russian journal of linguistics: Vestnik RUDN (Dec 2016)
Corpus Methods in the Study of Speech Genres: A Problem of Key Phrases
Abstract
The article discusses the theoretical and practical problems related to the study of speech genres on the basis of the material of databases, and generally using the methods of corpus linguistics. The richness, diversity and undoubted effectiveness of corpus methods for solving various linguistic tasks convince that such methods should be also used in linguistic studies of speech genres. At the same time, there is no developed corpus techniques for solving genre problems in linguistics. The role that should corpus methods play in general studies of speech genres is not clear. Also, most importantly, the relation between the units that are used / available in corpus databases, and speech genre is not clear. Methods of corpus linguistics exist only in cases where linguistic problems are solved with the use of quantitative and technical capabilities of corpus systems. In the foreground there is the problem of “key phrases”, or text markers of speech genres, which can be searched in the case. According to the authors, the key phrase of speech genre is its essential characteristic, which is present in speech genre competence of a native speaker and should be included in the relevant speech genre description as an additional parameter. Genre characteristics of this kind, in the future “encyclopedias of speech genres”, may be added to the characteristics set forth as a result of other, more traditional speech genre research. They might look like this: the genre - the presence of the key lexeme - key phrase / key phrases (for the identification of the genre) - the number of accesses to corpus - the key phrase (for the research of the context) - the number of accesses to corpus. The main requirements for key phrases are formulated: 1) a key phrase must have the main semantics of the genre; 2) in the corpus database system according to this criterion, you can actually search for and find many examples. An initial classification of the key phrases of speech genres has been proposed, that are opposed to themselves by 1) the nature of speech genres themselves of various types (particularly meaningful is the juxtaposition of standardized and free, direct and indirect genres); 2) the technical capabilities of buildings; 3) specific tasks of a speech genre study (whether to identify the genre of speech in the speech flow, or to carry out one or other quantitative analysis of the text within the already identified speech genres).
