Loud signatures

This paper is intended as a contribution to Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies1 (CADS), defined as a meeting of two disciplines, that of corpus linguistics and that of discourse analysis. Here, two small corpora of opinion articles from British broadsheets and Times Literary Supplement texts are compared, using WordSmith Tools, ConcGram and WMatrix to identify the salient resources, with particular reference to priming, lexico-grammatical patterns, textual interaction and the resources of engagement. Creative metaphors can be seen to exploit grammatical patterning and semantic preference to achieve pragmatic effects; and here a series of patterns are examined, looking at how irony uses the expectations set up by primings at the lexis-grammar interface. The paper also discusses the importance of text type and domain in certain patterns of grammatical cohesion.