The DQMD tag: A system of direct quotation meta-data tagging for EAP corpora

This article introduces a new standardized system of direct quotation meta-data tagging for instances of direct quotation in EAP corpora. The system was developed to assist corpus based research in direct quotations and to facilitate replication within the field of corpus-assisted discourse studies. Even though the system is currently implemented as a manual tagging system, suggestions are made regarding the creation of an algorithm to automate annotation, as is currently the case with PoS tagging.The system is comprised of a manually annotated six-letter tag (we call DQMD tag), and a set of custom corpus query language queries. The DQMD tag has been designed to precede each direct quotation in a corpus. The given corpus query strings allow either the direct quotation or the DQMD tag to be shown as the key word in context in a concordance. The system can be used to collect direct quotation frequency data and lexical data (including associated PoS data) using any combination of DQMD tag attributes.Sketch Engine was employed as the concordancer for examples in the article.