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

Abstract

This study addresses a familiar challenge in corpus pragmatic research: the search for functional phenomena in large electronic corpora. Speech acts are one area of research that falls into this functional domain and the question of how to identify them in corpora has occupied researchers over the past 20 years. This study focuses on apologies as a speech act that is characterised by a standard set of routine expressions, making it easier to search for with corpus linguistic tools. Nevertheless, even for a comparatively formulaic speech act, such as apologies, the polysemous nature of forms (cf. e.g. I am sorry vs. a sorry state) impacts the precision of the search output so that previous studies of smaller data samples had to resort to manual microanalysis. In this study, we introduce an innovative methodological approach that demonstrates how the combination of different types of collocational analysis can facilitate the study of speech acts in larger corpora. By first establishing a collocational profile for each of the Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices associated with apologies and then scrutinising their shared and unique collocates, unwanted hits can be discarded and the amount of manual intervention reduced. Thus, this article introduces new possibilities in the field of corpus-based speech act analysis and encourages the study of pragmatic phenomena in large corpora.

FromadministratortoCEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing

“…By the same token, a CL approach will not be the method of choice when the aim is to unpack discursive strategies that are elusive precisely because they are not associated with specific lexical items, but manifest themselves linguistically in diverse and unpredictable ways. (As far as the latter problem is concerned, the workaround suggested by Lutzky and Kehoe (2017) is a compelling solution for investigating the realization of a particular speech act, but this was not a viable option for us, given our much broader remit. )…”

Conceptualizing Illocutions in Context: A Variationist Perspective on the Meta-Illocutionary Lexicon

“…Based on these findings, one could hypothesize that AmE speakers correspondingly prefer Sorry, I am sorry, or We are sorry (cf. Flöck, 2016;Lutzky & Kehoe, 2017), but this claim requires verification.…”

“I’m a fat bird and I just don’t care”: A corpus-based analysis of body descriptors in plus-size fashion blogs

“…While blogs in general are popular material for different types of corpus-based studies (e.g. Kehoe & Gee, 2012;Lutzky & Kehoe, 2016;Lutzky & Kehoe, 2017;Lehti & Laippala, 2014), previous research on fashion blogs consists mainly of ethnographic case studies of small data-sets. As such, the present study brings a new perspective both to the study of the fashion blogging phenomenon in general, and plus-size fashion blogs in particular.…”