The paper addresses the issue of integrating methods of corpus linguistics into discourse analysis. While modern corpora are widely used in lexical and grammatical studies, their application to the research of various discourse phenomena seems to be limited. However, both corpus linguistics and discourse analysis are interested in usage rather than the norm, and this shared interest allows for application of corpus methods in discourse studies. The paper presents a brief overview of discourse analyses based on specialized corpora. The study of verbal irony illustrates how specialized and general language corpora can be used in discourse analysis. It also serves as an example that demonstrates the development of a discourse annotation scheme.