Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics

Diachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, bringing their research traditions in pragmatics and corpus linguistics in dialogue with each other. This is the first time that such a wide range of languages has been brought together to showcase an exciting new field at the intersection of pragmatics, historical linguistics and corpus methodology.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

This Element discusses the challenges and opportunities that different types of corpora offer for the study of pragmatic phenomena. The focus lies on a hands-on approach to methods and data that provides orientation for methodological decisions. In addition, the Element identifies areas in which new methodological developments are needed in order to make new types of data accessible for pragmatic research. Linguistic corpora are currently undergoing diversification. While one trend is to move towards increasingly large corpora, another trend is to enhance corpora with more specialised and layered annotation. Both these trends offer new challenges and opportunities for the study of pragmatics. This volume provides a practical overview of state-of-the-art corpus-pragmatic methods in relation to different types of corpus data, covering established methods as well as innovative approaches. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics provides a practical and comprehensive introduction to the growing field of corpus pragmatics. Taking a hands-on approach to showcase the applications of corpora in the exploration of core topics within pragmatics, this book: • covers six key areas of corpus-pragmatic research including speech acts, deixis, pragmatic markers, evaluation, conversational structure, and multimodality; • demonstrates the use of freely-available corpora, corpus interfaces and corpus analysis tools to conduct original pragmatic analyses; • is accompanied by an e-resource which hosts multimodal data sets for additional exercises. Featuring case studies and practical tasks within each chapter, Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics is an essential guide for students and researchers studying or conducting their own corpus-based research in pragmatics.

This book introduces a methodology and research tool (DART) that make it possible to carry out advanced corpus pragmatics research using dialogue corpora enriched with pragmatics-relevant annotations. It first explores the general use of spoken corpora for pragmatics research, as well as issues revolving around their representation and annotation, and then goes on to describe the resources required for such an annotation process. Based on data from three different corpora, ranging from highly constrained, task-oriented, ones (SPAADIA Trainline & Trains 93) to unconstrained dialogues (Switchboard), it next presents an in-depth discussion and illustration of the potential contributions of syntax, semantics, and semantico-pragmatics towards pragmatic force. This is followed by a description of the largely automatic annotation process itself, and finally an analysis of how a set of more than 110 potential speech acts defined in DART contributes towards establishing the specific communicative characteristics of the three corpora.

This Element is a contribution to a new generation of corpus pragmatics research by taking as its starting point the multifaceted nature of speech acts in conversation, and by adopting a mixed-methods approach. Through a unique combination of theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches, it provides a detailed investigation of advice-giving and advice uptake in relation to (i) the range of constructions used to give advice in different discourse contexts and at different points in time, and (ii) their interaction with dialogic and social factors of advice uptake as key components of frames of advice exchanges in natural conversation. Using data from the London-Lund Corpora of spoken British English, the Element shows, firstly, that there are systematic differences in advising between discourse contexts over the past half a century, and, secondly, that who gave the advice and how they did it are the strongest predictors of the advisee's response. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This volume presents current state-of-the-art discussions in corpus-based linguistic research of the English language. The papers deal with Present-day English, worldwide varieties of English and the history of the English language. A special focus of the volume are studies in the broad field of corpus pragmatics and corpus-based discourse analysis. It includes corpus-based studies of speech acts, conversational routines, referential expressions and thought styles, as well as studies on the lexis, grammar and semantics of English. And it also includes several studies on technical aspects of corpus compilation, fieldwork and parsing.

The purpose of Diachronic Pragmatics is to exemplify historical pragmatics in its twofold sense of constituting both a subject matter and a methodology. This book demonstrates how diachronic pragmatics, with its complementary diachronic function-to-form mapping and diachronic form-to-function mapping, can be used to trace pragmatic developments within the English language. Through a set of case studies it explores the evolution of such speech acts as promises, curses, blessings, and greetings and such speech events as flyting and sounding. Collectively these “illocutionary biographies” manifest the workings of several important pragmatic processes and trends: increased epistemicity, subjectification, and discursization (a special kind of pragmaticalization). It also establishes the centrality of cultural traditions in diachronic reconstruction, examining various de-institutionalizations of extra-linguistic context and their affect on speech act performance. Taken together, the case studies presented in Diachronic Pragmatics highlight the complex interactions of formal, semantic, and pragmatic processes over time. Illustrating the possibilities of historical pragmatic pursuit, this book stands as an invitation to further research in a new and important discipline.