27.1434, Review: Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Ling: Aijmer, Rühlemann (2014)

The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org
Fri Mar 25 14:09:19 UTC 2016


LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1434. Fri Mar 25 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1434, Review: Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Ling: Aijmer, Rühlemann (2014)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Sara  Couture <sara at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2016 10:08:45
From: Lamont Antieau [lamont_antieau at yahoo.com]
Subject: Corpus Pragmatics

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36081837


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-215.html

EDITOR: Karin  Aijmer
EDITOR: Christoph  Rühlemann
TITLE: Corpus Pragmatics
SUBTITLE: A Handbook
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Lamont D. Antieau, Cape Fear Community College

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Since the mid-20th century, corpus linguistics has served as an important part
of the toolset for scholars interested in the investigation of phonology,
morphology, syntax, and, of course, the lexicon. However, as the editors of
this volume argue, corpus-based approaches have not been applied to the study
of some linguistic subfields to the extent that they should be; in particular,
the area of pragmatics has been understudied in this regard. In an effort to
rectify this shortcoming by integrating corpus linguistics and pragmatics into
a single field of research, Karin Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann have compiled
the first handbook devoted to the emerging area of corpus pragmatics. 

Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook deals with the central themes of corpus
pragmatics by dividing them into six sections, each section containing case
studies of relevance to the issue at hand. Part I comprises three chapters
relating to the theme of “Corpora and Speech Acts.” As the editors point out,
speech acts have proven to be challenging for corpus linguistics, since many
of these acts are committed without the use of specific verbs and thus cannot
be captured by the lexicosemantic approach that has played such an important
role in corpus-based approaches in general. In the first chapter of the
section, Paula Garcia McAllister uses conversations that were collected in
academic contexts for the TOEFL Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus to
investigate the taxonomy of directives that was proposed by Searle (1969,
1979). In the second chapter, Thomas Kohnen provides an overview of work done
on speech acts in historical corpora and then uses three subcorpora – two from
the Helsinki Corpus and one from the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English – to
investigate change in the function of directives from the 15th century to the
late 19th century. Finally, Martin Weisser uses several subcorpora, including
the American telephone conversations from the Switchboard Corpus and the
Coconut Corpus, to illustrate improvements that can be made to pragmatic
annotation, given the difficulties that pragmatic phenomena present for
annotation over and beyond annotation of other linguistic levels.

The chapters in Part II, “Corpora and Pragmatic Principles,” center on
pragmatic principles that allow for the interpretation of utterances, such as
the Cooperative Principle, relevance and politeness, and how these can be
investigated using the tools of corpus linguistics. In the first of three
articles in the section, Gunther Kaltenböck uses the Diachronic Corpus of
Present Day Spoken English and the Corpus of Historical American English to
investigate the effect that processability has on syntactic development. Gisle
Andersen investigates relevance theory in regard to a number of English
interjections that have been borrowed by Norwegian speakers and their use in
conversation. In the final chapter of the section, Giuliani Diani investigates
politeness theory as it pertains to mitigation devices used in Italian and
English book reviews. 

The focus of the papers in Part III is on “Corpora and Pragmatic Markers,” an
area of study that has expanded beyond the investigation of prototypical
markers such as “you know” and “well” during recent years. In Chapter 7,
Aijmer uses the International Corpus of English to investigate the hypothesis
that the use of pragmatic markers is motivated by pragmatic principles such as
processability. Using three subcorpora from the Longman Spoken and Written
English corpus, Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber investigate the use of stance
markers in academic prose, conversation and newspapers in Chapter 8. In the
final chapter of the section, Neal R. Norrick investigates how interjections
are used in several spoken corpora of English, including the Longman Spoken
and Written English corpus and the Narrative Corpus.

The focus of Part IV, “Corpora and Evaluation,” is on the attitudes and stance
that speakers convey and the significant role these play in the interpretation
of speaker meaning. In Chapter 10, Alan Partington investigates evaluative
prosody using SiBol 05, a corpus of British broadsheet newspaper texts from
2005. In Chapter 11, Ivor Timmis uses three different corpora to examine how
speakers implement “tails” (or “right dislocation”; e.g. “People said they’d
never, never catch on, _teabags_”) to present evaluations in spoken
conversations. The chapters in Part V, “Corpora and Reference,” are concerned
with the problem of how language is used in communication about the world. In
Chapter 12, Rühlemann and Matthew Brook O’Donnell present evidence of deixis
that can be found in a variety of corpora. In Chapter 13, Winnie Cheng and
Annie O’Keeffe investigate vagueness, specifically in the use of the
approximator “about + n” (in which n represents a number) in corpora of Hong
Kong English and Irish English. 

Part VI, “Corpora and Turn-taking,” is the final section of the book and
centers on the importance of turn-taking in conversation and how the tools of
corpus linguistics can be used to facilitate analysis of turn-taking. In
Chapter 14, Gunnel Tottie investigates turn management and fillers in the
Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. In the next chapter, Pam
Peters and Deanna Wong examine the use of backchannels in turn management by
conducting an acoustic analysis of Australian telephone conversations in the
International Corpus of English. In the final chapter of the section (and the
book), Brian Clancy and Michael McCarthy present research on co-constructed
turn-taking in the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English and
the Limerick Corpus of Irish English.

EVALUATION

In providing an overview of the field and expanding research in several areas
under the umbrella of corpus pragmatics, Aijmer and Rühlemann meet the goals
that they establish in the introduction to the book, as it is indeed a volume
that both provides an extensive overview of previous work in the area of
corpus pragmatics and expands the field (p. 13). It does so by introducing
techniques and corpora that have been or are in the process of being developed
in the area and by presenting work on linguistic features that have only
recently been investigated using corpus-based approaches to the study of
pragmatics. In short, the book is of immense value for anyone interested in
the state of corpus-based approaches to pragmatics today.

While apparently intended for advanced students of the field, including
graduate students and seasoned academics, the book has a very readable style
that could also make for individual chapters being accessible to
undergraduates doing research on specific linguistic phenomena. Each of the
chapters presents a nice balance between a definition of the particular topic
at hand, a review of the literature in the area, text from corpora to provide
clear examples of the problem, and a theoretical discussion of the light shed
by this data on language structure and use. The book is highly cohesive, with
none of the chapters straying from the basic theme and tone of the book as a
whole. As the first handbook for corpus pragmatics, it can only be compared to
handbooks from other subfields of linguistics, such as sociolinguistics or
historical linguistics, or with other edited volumes comprising, for instance,
conference papers, on the intersection of corpus linguistics and pragmatics;
in comparison to these collections, the volume is highly consistent in terms
of themes and writing styles, which suggests that the editors must have made a
great effort to guide this diverse group of authors toward a rather unified
objective.

Although the book does a great job of presenting current research and covers
the necessary aspects of past research, there is less consistency in
discussing avenues for further research. The chapters in the first section on
speech acts pave the way for doing so; in particular, the first chapter
integrates four challenges for future research in its conclusion that could be
of use to anyone wishing to study speech acts using corpora. Chapters in later
sections are less consistent, however, in addressing these matters, with some
only giving brief mention of future research, and others none at all. As an
emerging field, it seems that it would be of benefit for all the chapters to
suggest areas of future research that scholars new to the field might
investigate or, at the very least, for authors to provide an idea of the
direction in which their own research might be headed. Thus, it could have
been useful for the authors of later chapters to follow the lead of earlier
chapters by dealing with issues of future research in a more explicit manner. 
 

In addition, there are some relatively minor areas in which more information
could have been provided. While chapter 1 clearly identifies the speech acts
addressed in the chapter (in table 1.1), speech acts addressed in chapter 2
are largely identified through the verbs that the name of each act applies to
rather than through a definition of each act and examples. An exhaustive list
of definitions for the speech acts used in the section, as well as in the book
as a whole, presented as an appendix might have been helpful to the reader and
would have established that all authors referring to specific speech acts in
the book were adhering to the same definitions of these phenomena.
Additionally, there are some gaps in the book’s index. For instance, despite
being the focal point of several discussions in the book – chapter 6, in
particular – “politeness” does not have its own entry but is instead referred
to by the subentries “negative” and “positive” under the entry for “face,” a
listing that might be of little use to some potential readers of the book.
Additionally, the entry for “directives” in the index ends at page 64, despite
discussion of their use later in the book, e.g. Kohnen’s section focusing on
them on pages 72 and 73. 

Despite these relatively minor shortcomings, Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook is
a must-read for researchers interested in the area of corpus pragmatics as
well as for scholars with interests in related areas of language use that
could benefit from corpus-based approaches. It provides an excellent overview
of the field of corpus pragmatics as a whole, and it offers a collection of
articles that are interesting, informative, and well written.   

REFERENCES

Searle, John. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, John. 1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech
acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lamont Antieau is the owner of Anvil Editing and an instructor at Cape Fear
Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina. His research interests are in
corpus linguistics, language variation, and pragmatics. His website
www.wordwatching.org discusses variation in Rocky Mountain English and
language use in pop music and social media.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

This year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $79,000. This money 
will go to help keep the List running by supporting all of our 
Student Editors for the coming year.

Don't forget to check out Fund Drive 2016 site!

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

For all information on donating, including information on how to 
donate by check, money order, PayPal or wire transfer, please visit:
http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Indiana University and 
as such can receive donations through the eLinguistics Foundation, 
which is a registered 501(c) Non Profit organization. Our Federal 
Tax number is 45-4211155. These donations can be offset against 
your federal and sometimes your state tax return (U.S. tax payers only). 
For more information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact your financial 
advisor.

Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that 
they will match any gift you make to a non-profit organization. 
Normally this entails your contacting your human resources department 
and sending us a form that the eLinguistics Foundation fills in and 
returns to your employer. This is generally a simple administrative 
procedure that doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without 
costing you an extra penny. Please take a moment to check if 
your company operates such a program.

Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1434	
----------------------------------------------------------







More information about the LINGUIST mailing list