31.2970, Review: Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Aijmer, Rühlemann (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2970. Wed Sep 30 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2970, Review: Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Aijmer, Rühlemann (2019)

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Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 22:08:10
From: Oksana Bomba [oksanabomba at usf.edu]
Subject: Corpus Pragmatics

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36610057


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-4780.html

EDITOR: Karin  Aijmer
EDITOR: Christoph  Rühlemann
TITLE: Corpus Pragmatics
SUBTITLE: A Handbook
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Oksana Bomba, University of South Florida

SUMMARY

“Corpus Pragmatics,” edited by Karin Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann, is a
handbook that includes 16 chapters written by a team of professionals from all
over the world. The book chapters are grouped under six conceptual themes,
establishing a connection between corpora and speech acts, pragmatic
principles, pragmatic markers, evaluation, reference, and turn-taking. Every
chapter includes a case study that highlights a specific pragmatic phenomenon
and investigates it utilizing authentic language data available from corpora.

In the introduction section the editors provide the definitions of pragmatics
and corpus linguistics, claiming that the two fields can “profit from each
other” (p. 1). They outline the basic principles of corpus-pragmatic analysis
which combines horizontal (qualitative) and vertical (quantitative)
dimensions, as well as present a brief overview of the whole volume.  The
stated goal of the handbook is to overview the existing work as well as “to
lay the foundations” (p. 23) for the field of corpus pragmatics.

Part I “Corpora and speech acts” includes three chapters demonstrating the
effective use of corpus tools in analyzing various types of speech acts.
Chapter 1, “Speech acts: a synchronic perspective” by Paula Garcia McAllister,
reports on the investigation of directives across different academic contexts,
as well as the relationship between situation type and speech acts. The
chapter presents a case study that utilized the audiotaped recordings from the
TOEFL 200 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. For the situation
types, the author focused on service encounters, office hours, and study
groups. The audio was transcribed, including meta-information on the setting
and interlocutors. The study used the “bottom-up approach”– the researcher
classified and coded the utterances as belonging to a specific speech act,
based on its contextual characteristics. Then corpus tools were used to
analyze and assign even more linguistic details for each utterance, and to
create a dataset where every utterance was included along with its
descriptors. The results revealed that the type of speech act greatly depended
on the situation type. While requests and suggestions were the most frequent,
some other speech acts like asking for/granting permissions or making
corrections also occurred in academic contexts and warrant further study. 

Chapter 2, “Speech acts: a diachronic perspective” by Thomas Kohnen, starts by
overviewing the existing research on speech acts in the history of English. It
points out existing trends and challenges regarding the identification and
description of speech acts. This is followed by a case study of English
performatives across three historical sub-corpora of the English language from
the fifteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on their
distribution across different genres (e.g. trials, letters, plays, sermons).
The study revealed both the strengthening and the decrease of certain classes
of performatives over time, connecting these tendencies with some
socio-cultural factors such as the evolution of face-based politeness and
literacy.

Chapter 3, “Speech act annotation” by Martin Weisser, discusses the challenges
related to the precise annotation of pragmatic phenomena in corpora. The
author compares three existing annotation schemes, presenting examples of
their application for task-driven dialogues that are derived from different
corpora. This is followed by a brief case study investigating the strategies
used by efficient call center agents. The study utilized data from the
Trainline corpus in the form of recorded phone interactions between British
agents and customers seeking assistance. The conducted search of syntactic
tags + speech act labels revealed that the agent employed specific linguistic
structures, testifying to their efficiency (e.g. stating fragments in
combination with deictic fragments, yes/no questions requesting directives).
The DART pragmatic annotation, used for the study analysis, was claimed to be
efficient and more accessible than other annotation tools. The author also
called for further improvement of the existing annotation schemes,
highlighting the importance of incorporating information on the speaker roles
and the levels of authority, which in turn should further inform research on
politeness.

Part II “Corpora and pragmatic principles” includes three chapters analyzing
how the pragmatic principles of processability, relevance, and politeness are
reflected in language. Chapter 4, “Processibility” by Gunther Kaltenböck,
focuses on the potential impact of the principle of processability on
syntactic structures. Utilizing data from various diachronic corpora, the
presented case study investigated the development of the presentational matrix
clauses (e.g. the thing is, it’s just like, etc.). It demonstrated how those
types of clauses occur in the initial position, carry low informational value,
and function to introduce a new proposition. It also highlighted the
usefulness of corpora for tracking the development of presentational matrix
clauses. 

Chapter 5, “Relevance” by Gisle Andersen, adopts the relevance-theoretic
approach, highlighting the role of discourse markers and interjections in the
utterance interpretation process. The chapter includes two case studies that
used Norwegian and British/ American English corpora for investigating the
markers as if and duh across languages from the perspective of relevance
theory. The studies revealed that those markers helped to enforce negativity
toward some aspect in the utterance, as well as signaled other pragmatic cues
in speaker attitude.

Chapter 6, “Politeness” by Giuliana Diani compares the forms of mitigated
criticism in English and Italian academic book reviews from the perspective of
politeness theory, using corpus-based analysis. The author analyzed the types
and distribution of mitigation strategies (e.g. praise-criticism,
criticism-suggestion, etc.), as well as the linguistic forms and frequencies
of hedges across different corpora. The study findings showed the existing
cross-linguistic differences in the frequency of hedges, as well as some
similarities in the types of mitigation strategies used across corpora.

Part III “Corpora and pragmatic markers” presents three chapters that focus on
linguistic form and pragmatic functions of classical, as well as less
prototypical, markers. Chapter 7, “Pragmatic markers” by Karin Aijmer presents
a study that analyzed the multifunctionality of I think across the
conversation and the broadcast discussion contexts, utilizing the British part
from the International Corpus of English. The study demonstrates that in
different contexts this pragmatic marker may serve different functions,
ranging from expressing spontaneous opinions and up to strategically
supporting a particular viewpoint. The study demonstrates that the meaning of
pragmatic markers is dynamic and is shaped by the larger contextual cues.

Chapter 8, “Stance markers” by Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber, briefly
overviews the construct of “stance” and presents a case study that explored
the new stance adjective and noun structures, typical for academic writing.
The study utilized the subcorpora of academic writing, newspaper informational
writing, and spoken conversation from The Longman Spoken and Written English
Corpus. The chapter describes the distribution and the forms of specific
structures (e.g. stance noun+ that-clause, stance adjective + to-clause, etc.)
that express the author’s evaluation, attitude, or certainty and calls for
further work on developing explicit criteria for operationalization of the
concept of  “stance.”

Chapter 9, “Interjections” by Neal R. Norrick, analyzes the distribution and
functions of interjections using corpus tools. The author presents a range of
examples derived from English corpora, where interjections are related to
exclamative constructions, mark constructed dialogue, form phrasal
interjections, or function as combinations of interjections. Depending on the
context and the structure, interjections may signal emotional involvement, add
emotional force, intensify the climax of some story, indicate a suggestion,
signify resignation, etc. The chapter brings up the issue of inconsistent
tagging, pointing out that, while corpus tools help with identification of the
contexts where interjections occur, it should be followed by careful
qualitative analysis to specify the functions of interjections. 

Part IV “Corpora and evaluation” includes two chapters focusing on how a
speaker’s attitude is reflected in various language forms and discourse
structures. Chapter 10, “Evaluative prosody” by Alan Partington, highlights
the idea that words co-occur with other words reaching the effect of
expressing positive or negative polarity. Evaluative prosody is rather
implicit and extends beyond the single word level, with two or more lexical
items having been intuitively co-selected by speakers for expressing their
positive or negative evaluations. Similar to meaning change, the diachronic
development of evaluative prosodies can also be analyzed using empirical data
from different corpora. Corpus data help to analyze the phenomenon of
evaluative prosody through providing rich authentic data that allows analyzing
how speakers express and distribute their attitude in a cohesive manner, going
above the single word level, due to their intuitive knowledge of language
prosodic possibilities.

Chapter 11, “Tails” by Ivor Timmis, focuses on the analysis of tails across
the Irish component of the ICE Corpus, the British National Corpus, and the
Bolton Corpus. The presented study analyzed the distribution of noun phrase
tails, pronoun tails, simple operator tails, and inverted operator tails
across different contexts. It also described the existing dialectal and
sociopragmatic variation of tails across the corpora. The chapter highlights
multiple pragmatic functions of tails, including but not limited to the
speaker’s seeking agreement, retrospectively clarifying a discourse referent,
creating intimacy between interlocutors, contributing to the shift in deictic
focus, expressing positive /negative evaluation and aspects of identity.

Part V “Corpora and reference” includes two chapters exploring pragmatic
concepts related to the act of referring. Chapter 12, “Deixis” by Christoph
Rühlemann and Matthew B. O’Donnell, overviews the characteristics of deixis
and presents a case study that examines the use of this in the Narrative
Corpus (NC). The results of the study reveal that this tends to occur in a
narrative-initial position, introducing the key referent and entities that are
vital for the narrative unfolding. The author also stressed the fact that
working with the specialized NC corpus that included sophisticated annotation
greatly facilitated the study, contributing to a much deeper understanding of
deixis and carrying the great potential for studying other pragmatic
phenomena.

Chapter 13, “Vagueness” by Winnie Cheng and Anne O’Keeffe, focuses on the use
of vague approximators in the context of reference, comparing corpus data of
native and non-native speakers across the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English
and the Limerick Corpus of Irish English. One of the challenges for this case
study was the fact that vague language is not automatically tagged in corpora;
and this  required adopting a vague language (VL) taxonomy and defining
specific VL sub-types to conduct corpora search. The study focused on the
approximator + number forms of VL and revealed similarities in VL distribution
across the corpora, with the form about +n being the most frequent and used to
relate to calendar periods. The qualitative analysis showed culturally
specific instances of how VL was used with the meaning of directness or
expressing size. The corpus examples allowed us to analyze both successful and
less successful cases of the VL reference, connecting it to the degree of
shared social and cultural knowledge between the interlocutors.

Part VI “Corpora and turn-taking” includes three chapters describing the
pragmatic means of managing the interlocutors’ right to speak in the flow of
conversation. Chapter 14, “Turn management and the fillers uh and um” by
Gunnel Tottie, focuses on the distribution, as well as conversational
functions of the filler vocalizations uh and um in the Santa Barbara Corpus of
Spoken American English. The findings show that the fillers occurred the most
frequently in the turn-medial position, signaling the speaker was in the
process of continuing their turn. The fillers in the turn-initial position
mostly functioned in the context of responding to somebody’s questions rather
than self-initiating the turn, and in the turn-final position they expressed
yielding the floor for the other interlocutor. The collaborative, rather than
competitive, nature of interlocutors’ turn-taking is highlighted in this
chapter.

Chapter 15, “Turn management and backchannels'' by Pam Peters and Deanna Wong,
presents the study of backchannelling markers mm and yeah and their role in
turn-management, utilizing data on phone conversations from the Australian
component of the International Corpus of English. It demonstrates that both
temporal properties and the context of occurrence (stand-alone or
first/finally in a string) contribute to the pragmatic meaning of the
backchannelling markers which can range from supporting the turn of the
current speaker to signaling the need for turn exchange.

Chapter 16, “Co-constructed turn-taking” by Brian Clancy and Michael McCarthy,
presents research on the co-constructed conversational units. The presented
case study focused on corpus examples that involve one of the three
conjunctions (if, when, which) occurring at points of conversational
co-construction by two or more speakers. The study used data from the two
conversational corpora of British and Irish English language and made use of
speaker tags to identify clear examples of co-constructed utterances. The
study highlighted the existing variety of canonical syntactic patterns that
enable joint co-constructed turn-taking by speakers and facilitate the smooth
flow of the conversation.

EVALUATION

“Corpus Pragmatics” is a rich depository of information for graduate students
and researchers. The authors successfully met the goal of overviewing and
expanding the field of corpus pragmatics by keeping the right balance between
theoretical background and practical aspects of analysis, including specific
empirical authentic examples from corpus data. The use of multiple figures and
tables was also helpful for understanding the main methodological steps and
findings in the course of the provided empirical case studies. The handbook
sheds light both on the achievements and the existing challenges related to
using corpora for pragmatic research.

While the volume does an excellent job conceptualizing the pragmatic concepts
and providing the specifics of corpus analysis, it would benefit from an
appendix summarizing all corpora mentioned in the volume (with a brief
description of all genres presented in the corpora and information on which
corpora are publicly available).  This would be a great reference for novice
researchers who are willing to further investigate pragmatic phenomena and are
looking for optimal corpus sources for their study. That being said, “Corpus
Pragmatics” provides a solid repository of knowledge and new research avenues
for everybody who wants to further explore and contribute to this fascinating
linguistic field.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Oksana Bomba is a doctorate student in Linguistics and Applied Language
Studies (LALS) at the University of South Florida. Her research interests
include second language acquisition, academic writing, and corpus linguistics.
She has taught English, Russian, and Linguistics in multiple contexts and to
language learners of varied ages and cultural backgrounds.





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