Q1. CDA also focuses on how discourse structures influence mental representations.

At the global level

of discourse, topics may influence what people see as the most important information of text or talk,
and thus correspond to the top levels of their mental models. For example, expressing such a topic in a
headline in news may powerfully influence how an event is defined in terms of a “preferred” mental
model (e.g. when crime committed by minorities is typically topicalized and headlined in the press: Duin
et al. 1988; van Dijk 1991). Similarly, argumentation may be persuasive because of the social opinions
that are “hidden” in its implicit premises and thus taken for granted by the recipients, e.g. immigration
may thus be restricted if it is presupposed in a parliamentary debate that all refugees are “illegal” (see
the contributions in Wodak and van Dijk 2000) Likewise, at the local level, in order to understand
discourse meaning and coherence, people may need models featuring beliefs that remain implicit
(presupposed) in discourse. Thus, a typical feature of manipulation is to communicate beliefs implicitly,
that is, without actually asserting them, and with less chance that they will be challenged.

Q2. Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis [CADS]) is that analysts are concerned to consider not only the
corpus-derived data, but also the texts and contexts from which these data are derived. While Corpus
Linguistics is essentially a quantitative approach to language, concerned with the frequency of
occurrence of various language patterns, CADS introduces an additional, qualitative dimension to
analysis. In addition, where mainstream corpora may consist of samples of texts, corpora used in CADS
will more likely be made up of complete texts. Corpus approaches to discourse (or, to put it the other
way round, discourse approaches to corpora) are becoming more and more popular.

Baker (2006) discusses a number of advantages of a corpus-based approach to discourse, as follows.

First, because corpus tools can provide many examples of a given linguistic phenomenon, they can
provide a greater degree of objectivity than can a qualitative analysis, that may be limited to a single
text or small number of texts, (p. 12).

Second, Baker notes that a corpus-based approach can identify what he refers to as ‘the incremental
effect of discourse’, by which he means how discourses (with a small D) are built up over time, even
though particular items might not occur that frequently. Corpus tools can identify how such discourses
are created incrementally. He gives the example of the following sentence: ‘Diana, herself a keen sailor
despite being confined to a wheelchair for the last 45 years, hopes the boat will encourage more
disabled people on to the water.’ We may argue here, following Baker, that in spite of this sentence
appearing to construct disabled people in a positive way, the use of the phrase confined to a wheelchair,
and the way that the coordinator despite is used here, prompt the reader to infer that the disabled are
not expected to be keen sailors. So, which Discourse does this sentence represent: the positive one or
the negative one? By applying corpus tools to a large general corpus of British English, Baker is able to
ascertain that the items ‘confined’ and ‘wheelchair’ have a tendency to co-occur and that ‘wheelchair’
also tends to co-occur with coordinators such as despite and although. Baker concludes from this
analysis that the original sentence about Diana is not an isolated case and that it belongs to a Discourse
which negatively constructs people in wheelchairs.

A third advantage of a corpus-based approach to discourse noted by Baker is the opposite of the
incremental argument‫ عكس الحجة المتزايده‬, that is to say, that the use of a particular linguistic feature
identified in a single text, which might lead the analyst in a particular direction, may not be corroborated
in a corpus of texts. The corpus thus, here serves as a check on the analyst.

A fourth advantage of Corpus-based Discourse Analysis for Baker is the opportunity that it

provides for triangulation‫( التثليث‬the use of multiple methods of analysis). Discourse Analysis of
individual texts represents one mode of enquiry, while corpus-based study represents another, both
supporting each other and making the analysis more reliable.