Shirley Carter-Thomas. Douglas Biber, Ulla Connor, Thomas A. Upton, Discourse on the Move: Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure. ASp – La revue du GERAS, 2010, 57, pp.87-91.

I was impatient to read this new book by Douglas Biber and colleagues and discover their views on using corpus-based approaches to investigate discourse structure. However, the first point to make about the book, volume 28 in the John Benjamins series Studies in corpus linguistics, is its rather particular authorial status. This is not a book written solely by the three authors named on the jacket; nor is it however an edited volume. It is instead a multi-authored work, and in addition to Douglas Biber, Ulla Connor and Thomas Upton, there are six further co-authors: Budsaba Kanoksilapatham, Molly Anthony, Kostyantyn Gladkov, Eniko Csomay, James K. Jones and Casey Keck. There are two single-authored chapters, Chapter 4 by Kanoksilapatham and Chapter 8 by Csomay, and the other chapters are written by a combination of two to four of the nine authors (the reader has to return to the preface for the precise authors’ names). As a result of this complex structure, the book seems to fall between two stools, containing perhaps neither the variety of a volume of edited articles, nor the more streamlined focussed organisation of a more traditionally authored book.