2 - Concepts, Data, and Methods

Summary

Chapter 2 of Discourse Syntax (Concepts, Data, and Methods) further clarifies the need for studying patterns of syntactic use and variation in English with emphasis on the surrounding text (co-text), which is itself embedded in a specific discourse situation (context). It also differentiates between sentences and utterances and introduces the notion of “register” as a grouping of linguistic patterns arising from the discourse situation and distinguishes between a text-linguistic (focus on text) and a variationist perspective (focus on a syntactic variable) in studying syntactic variation, as well as methods of data collection, including guidance on working with corpora, corpus searches, data cleaning, and data interpretation, as well as research design in line with these two approaches.