This paper aims to explore the issues involved in the discourse analyst’s search for correlations between meaning and expression across a corpus of texts and in the contemporaneous, not uncommon, finding that there is just so much, with reference to such questions, that the concordance line can tell us.1 More specifically, it will investigate the value of the multidirectional descriptive method of ‘shunting’ (Halliday 1961, in 2002: 45), in this case from a lowerlevel corpus analysis to a complementary higher-level, ‘text-collection’ analysis, illustrating the method by examining a small corpus of donation requests from one’s Alma Mater