Corpus linguistics, pragmatics and discourse

Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2015

“…In her classic article on data collection in pragmatics research, Kasper ( 2000 ) gives an overview of methods that ranges from the observation of naturally occurring discourse to eliciting language by different experimental procedures. In applying Clark and Bangerter's ( 2004 ) categories of methods of data collection to speech act research, Jucker ( 2009 ) distinguishes between three fundamental types of data collection tools: fi eld, laboratory and armchair. While armchair approaches investigate participants' intuitions and attitudes about language use, fi eld and laboratory approaches aim at studying actual language use.…”

“…However, a number of studies have indicated that speech acts elicited by DCTs differ from speech acts collected in authentic conditions (e.g. Wolfson 1981 ;Kasper 2000 ;Jucker 2009 ;Economidou-Kogetsidis 2013 ). Unfortunately, these studies do not provide us with conclusive results as to how the methodological infl uence manifests itself in the data.…”

“…By translating Manes and Wolfson's ( 1981 ) compliment formulae into abstract search strings, Jucker et al ( 2008 ) partially overcome this problem and are able to retrieve compliments from the BNC automatically. The authors note however, that almost every query fails to have complete precision (searches for relevant patterns may generate forms that are functionally not equivalent to the speech act in question) and recall (searches may fail to fi nd all instances of the speech act in the corpus).…”

“I apologise for my poor blogging”: Searching for Apologies in the Birmingham Blog Corpus

“…Romero-Trillo 2008;Jucker et al 2009;Jucker 2013;Aijmer and Rühlemann 2015) and scholars have investigated ways in which the two areas of study could be combined. This pertains in particular to addressing the question of how specific pragmatic phenomena can be searched for with corpus linguistic software given that they often represent linguistic functions rather than forms, as is the case with speech acts, which can ''not be searched for directly in large computerised corpora'' (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2014b: 257).…”

The functions of “just kidding” in American English

“…In order to locate a wide range of examples of these formulaic sequences in spontaneous use, we employed corpusassisted methods of analysis. While researchers have long employed large corpora in order to gain a better understanding of lexical and grammatical patterns in language (e.g., Biber et al, 1999;Carter and McCarthy, 1997), the role of corpora in studies investigating pragmatic functions of language has been less clear, due to the inherent difficulty of analyzing pragmatic function in large, decontextualized corpora (Jucker et al, 2009;Romero-Trillo, 2008). Despite these difficulties, researchers in corpus pragmatics have successfully demonstrated the capability of corpora to provide a fruitful means of gaining a better understanding into pragmatic language use (e.g., Aijmer, 2002).…”