The use of grammatically annotated corpora for the display of textual patterns

Abstract

This paper looks at how meanings unfold across the genre of Contemporary Slovenian Sermons under the application of tools developed within the fields of systemic functional linguistics and corpus linguistics. The theoretical construct for the analysis is provided by Hasan';s (1984) concept of genre and Cloran';s (1994) concept of message semantics. To determine consistency of textual patterns for the genre of sermons, lexico-grammatical patterns in sermons are examined. It is argued that genre analysis, supported by visual presentation of lexico-grammatical patterns (as suggested by Biber et al. 1998) extracted from a grammatically annotated corpus of Slovenian sermons, provides a fuller picture of crucial properties of genre.