Collaborative Knowledge Building through the Lens of Paraphrasing

This paper attempts to present innovations brought into corpus methodology by using the concept of paraphrase to account for the meaning of lexical items. Collaborative knowledge building is conceived of not merely the individual introduction of paraphrases discussing the features of the discourse objects but continuous subsequent negotiation of this input over a temporal arrow. With proposal of the Categories of Paraphrasing and analysis made into discourse relations of paraphrases, this paper argues that knowledge building is established as a social practice, and knowledge in this sense is only shared knowledge and is exchanged in verbal form between the members of a discourse community. As knowledge is present in the discourse, corpus linguistic approach could be a useful alternative methodology for documenting collaborative knowledge building.