Comparable Corpora in Cross-cultural Genre Studies: Tools for the Analysis of CSR reports

The chapter explores the potential of corpus tools in cross cultural studies of genres, using a cross cultural analysis of CSR reports as a case study. Based on the assumption that: a) the most important contribution of corpus linguistics lies in providing tools for the calculation of frequencies and for the observation of combination of elements; b) a cross-cultural comparison of genres requires integration of lexical categories with semantic and functional pragmatic perspectives, the chapter looks at how corpus tools (most notably keyness and concordances) can contribute to different ways of integrating these lexical, semantic and functional-pragmatic perspectives in genre analysis and how they can contribute to different, complementary paths of integration (bottom-up and top-down). It also shows that the integration of bottom-up procedures (from lexical units to semantics and functional-pragmatic units) and top-down procedures (from functional-pragmatic units to semantics and lexical units) can actually take place at different levels of textual structure.