Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Major Corpora Cited in the Handbook
- Introduction
- Part I Methodological Considerations
- Part II Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Characteristics
- Part III Corpus Analysis of Varieties
- 13 Register Variation
- 14 Multidimensional Analysis
- 15 Spoken Discourse
- 16 Online Language: The Web and Social Media
- 17 Corpora and Written Academic English
- 18 Professional Registers
- 19 Legal Language
- 20 Diachronic Registers
- 21 Literary Style and Literary Texts
- 22 Dialect Variation
- 23 World Englishes
- 24 L1 English Learner Language at School and University
- 25 L2 English Learner Varieties
- Part IV Other Applications of Corpus Analysis
- Index
- References
15 - Spoken Discourse
from Part III - Corpus Analysis of Varieties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2026
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Major Corpora Cited in the Handbook
- Introduction
- Part I Methodological Considerations
- Part II Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Characteristics
- Part III Corpus Analysis of Varieties
- 13 Register Variation
- 14 Multidimensional Analysis
- 15 Spoken Discourse
- 16 Online Language: The Web and Social Media
- 17 Corpora and Written Academic English
- 18 Professional Registers
- 19 Legal Language
- 20 Diachronic Registers
- 21 Literary Style and Literary Texts
- 22 Dialect Variation
- 23 World Englishes
- 24 L1 English Learner Language at School and University
- 25 L2 English Learner Varieties
- Part IV Other Applications of Corpus Analysis
- Index
- References
Summary
Spoken discourse is a less commonly explored domain of corpus-based research. This chapter explores these challenges, as well as providing an overview of current corpus research on spoken discourse and emerging research areas. It concludes with a case study illustrating methods for these emerging research areas. The chapter highlights newer areas of corpus-based research such as fluency, prosody, and multimodal studies, language variation and change, and discourse-level units and includes an empirical study that illustrates two of these research areas through the use of fluency, prosody, and multimodal features across nurse–patient interactions. Rather than reporting on the interactions as a whole, the analysis also shows frequency of occurrence across discourse-level units: opening the visit, establishing the patient’s chief complaint, examination of the patient (both physical and patient history), counseling the patient (providing care options), and closing the interaction. The data comes from the US Nurse–Standardized Patient Corpus (Staples, 2015), and includes fifty interactions between nurses and standardized patients, who are actors trained to present the same case to multiple providers. The study demonstrates some of the more challenging elements of spoken discourse analysis and offers insights for the analysis of spoken discourse, particularly in these emerging research areas.
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- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics , pp. 314 - 336Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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