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13 - Corpus Pragmatics

from Part III - Pragmatic Approaches to Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2023

By
Karin Aijmer
Edited by
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Summary

The chapter gives a state-of- the-art overview of the themes and issues in corpus pragmatics and describes new directions in the field represented by empirical corpus studies where synchronic pragmatic variation and change are analyzed in a broader social and cultural perspective. The interaction between corpora and pragmatics implies both challenges and possibilities. Corpora are ideal for studying the relationship between form and function.This is illustrated by studies using corpora for the purpose of investigating the functions of pragmatic markers, interjections, address forms, and pauses. Nowadays there is also a great deal of interest in finding strategies, making it possible to study the linguistic realisations of functions such as speech acts, hedging, and politeness. Pragmatic annotation systems are expected to be interesting from this perspective. New developments in corpus pragmatics are characterized by alliances between corpus pragmatics and other fields such as variational pragmatics and sociopragmatics with a shared interest in the influence of context on language. Pragmatic markers are, for example, now studied on the basis of corpora with respect to macro-sociolinguistic variables such as region, genre, and the age, gender, and social class of the speakers. Attention is also given to a new discipline of historical corpus pragmatics emerging at the intersection between historical linguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics.

Keywords

corporapragmaticspragmatic annotationpragmatic markersociolingustic variablevariational pragmatics,sociopragmaticshistorical corpus pragmaticsinterlanguage corpus pragmaticsmultimodal corpora
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context , pp. 289 - 313
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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