discoursesthat

Discoursesthat is a hypothetical scholarly resource described as a corpus and analytical framework for studying the use of that-clauses and related discourse constructions across genres and languages. In this context, “discoursesthat” refers both to a linguistic pattern—where a verb of saying, asserting, or believing governs a subordinate clause introduced by that—and to a platform that collects, annotates, and enables examination of such patterns.

Conceptually, discoursesthat aims to document how speakers frame propositions, report statements, and cite sources within discourse. Researchers may analyze variables such as the discourse verb, the presence and type of the complement clause, hedging strategies, stance, attribution, and modality. The resource is intended to facilitate cross-domain comparisons, for example between political rhetoric, news reporting, and social media commentary, to understand how that-clauses contribute to perception, credibility, and argument structure.

Data and methods typically envisioned for discoursesthat include multi-genre text collections drawn from public transcripts, news archives, parliamentary records, and user-generated content. Annotations might cover discourse type (reporting, claim, request), attribution (explicit vs. implicit), certainty, stance, and source reliability. Natural language processing pipelines would support clause identification, syntactic parsing, and relation extraction, while human annotators would ensure consistency of category and nuance.

Usage and access details are described in terms of licensing, documentation, and tools. The platform is envisioned to offer search interfaces, API access, and export formats to support linguistic analysis, discourse studies, and computational social science. Limitations often noted include sample bias, annotation subjectivity, and the complexity of cross-linguistic encoding.

See also: discourse analysis, that-clauses, reporting verbs, attribution, corpus linguistics.