SiBol is an international, interdepartmental research group, founded in 2002, dedicated to Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). The aim of the CADS approach is the uncovering, in the discourse types under study, of non-obvious meaning, that is, meaning which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal and simple introspection. CADS methodologies entail the integration of statistical (or ‘quantitative’) analyses characteristic of corpus linguistics of the frequency, infrequency - and even absence - of linguistic phenomena with the more traditional kind of ‘qualitative’ close-reading analyses employed in discourse studies. The CADS approach is particularly suited for making informative and evidenced comparisons among different but related discourse types.
The group has produced works in the fields, among others, of lexical grammar, evaluation studies, media and political linguistics, metaphor, analysis of conversation and other forms of spoken interaction and translation / comparative studies, as well as in a new form of CADS, denominated Modern-Diachronic Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS), in which large corpora of a parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time are employed in order to track changes in modern language usage but also social, cultural and political changes over modern times, as reflected in language.
* SiBol is a portmanteau of Siena and Bologna, the two universities where the founders of the group - Alison Duguid, Anna Marchi, John Morley and Charlotte Taylor (Siena) and Alan Partington and Caroline Clark (Bologna) - were employed.