Construction approach as a method of textual analysis. Propositions based on a corpus of texts concerning the economic situation

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to describe and defend a corpus-based approach for analysing texts and discourses. To this aim, we use a data analysis infrastructure developed at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Dijon. The collected data is transformed into a corpus that is analysed from a construction grammar perspective in order to highlight the textual significance of constructions (function-form pairings) in a specialized discourse. We then introduce the notion of textual function for some constructions, like the <[X] + [être enregistr*] + [Y] + [Z]> construction in the French Finance Discourse. The contribution aims at pleading for the existence of such constructions and showing how they can contribute to a usage-based semantic text analysis.