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Cross-linguistic Correspondences: From lexis to genre
Edited by Thomas Egan and Hildegunn Dirdal
[Studies in Language Companion Series 191] 2017
► pp. 221–252

Chapter 9
A corpus-based analysis of genre-specific multi-word combinations

Minutes in English and Spanish

| University of Valladolid
English and Spanish minutes both contain two vocabulary sets, one that codifies the ‘field’ and belongs in a given content area, and another that codifies the discursive practices of the genre ‘minutes’. This paper sets out to explore which multi-word combinations can be identified as genre- and step-specific, and what correspondences can be identified across languages. The study draws on an English–Spanish comparable corpus of meeting minutes, tagged on the rhetorical level. A comparable corpus browser with a basic statistic feature has been used to obtain step subcorpora and WordSmith Tools was used to obtain n-grams within rhetorical steps in each language. N-grams were classified as genre-specific, step-specific, field-related, function-word combination or noise. Empirical findings show that for each rhetorical move, irrespective of text ‘field’, a number of n-grams have become readily associated in each of the languages. Since word choice is determined by genre-bound expectations and by context, selections across languages are not obvious and correspondences show different grams and number of grams.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Material and method
    • 3.1Corpus-based move analysis: The rhetorical structure of minutes of meetings
    • 3.2Materials: The corpus
    • 3.3N-grams
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Discussion n-grams
      • 4.1.1Discussion n-grams: English
      • 4.1.2Discussion n-grams: Spanish
      • 4.1.3Discussion n-grams: English–Spanish comparison
    • 4.2Adjourn n-grams
      • 4.2.1Adjourn n-grams: English
      • 4.2.2Adjourn n-grams: Spanish
      • 4.2.3Adjourn n-grams: English–Spanish comparison
    • 4.3N-grams: Adjourn–Discussion comparison
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.191.09san
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