Cover not available

In:Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Edited by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 294] 2018
► pp. 241–266

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Corpus linguistics and pragmatics

 | Philipps University Marburg, Germany
 | Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland
Published online: 7 September 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.294.11ruh
Abstract
Pragmatics and corpus linguistics were long considered mutually exclusive. In recent years, however, common ground has been discovered thus paving the way for the new field of corpus pragmatics. This chapter shows that corpus pragmatics integrates the qualitative methodology typical of pragmatics with the quantitative methodology predominant in corpus linguistics. To illustrate, we examine the choice between indicative was and subjunctive were in as-if clauses in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggest that the choice is co-determined by the factuality of the comparison expressed in the as-if clause and the syntactic functions of the as-if clause in the matrix clause. We finally discuss the was/were alternation as a form of negative empathetic deixis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Case study: Indicative was and subjunctive were in as-if clauses – a case of empathetic deixis?
    • 2.1Introduction
    • 2.2Data
    • 2.3Methods
    • 2.4Results
  • 3.Discussion
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
References (62)
References
Adolphs, Svenja. 2008. Corpus and Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aijmer, Karin. 1996. Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. Understanding Pragmatic Markers: A Variational-Pragmatic Approach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aijmer, Karin, and Christoph Rühlemann (eds). 2015. Corpus Pragmatics. A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Amador-Moreno, Carolina, and Kevin McCafferty. 2015. “‘Sure this is a great country for drink and rowing at elections’: Discourse Markers in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence, 1750–1940.” In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English, ed. by Carolina Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, 270–291. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Archer, Dawn, and Jonathan Culpeper. 2003. “Sociopragmatic Annotation: New Directions and Possibilities in Historical Corpus Linguistics.” In Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, ed. by Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson, and Anthony McEnery, 37–58. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald. 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barron, Anne. 2015. “‘And your wedding is the twenty-second <.> of June is it?’: Tag Questions in Irish English.” In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English, ed. by Carolina Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, 203–228. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernaisch, Tobias, Stefan Th. Gries, and Joybrato Mukherjee. 2014. “The Dative Alternation in South Asian English(es): Modelling Predictors and Predicting Prototypes.” English World-Wide 35 (1): 7–31. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caffi, Claudia, and Richard Janney. 1994. “Toward a Pragmatics of Emotive Communication.” Journal of Pragmatics 22 (3–4): 325–373. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carter, Ronald, and Michael McCarthy. 2006. Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clancy, Brian. 2015. “ Hurry up baby son all the boys is finished their breakfast: Examining the Use of Vocatives as Pragmatic Markers in Irish Traveller and Settled Family Discourse.” In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English, ed. by Carolina Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, 229–247. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. Investigating Intimate Discourse: Exploring the Spoken Interaction of Families, Couples and Friends. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clancy, Brian, and Michael McCarthy. 2015. “Co-constructed Turn-taking.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin Aijmer, and Christoph Rühlemann, 430–453. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clancy, Brian, and Anne O’Keeffe. 2015. “Pragmatics.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Douglas Biber, and Randi Reppen, 235–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davies, Bethan. 2007. “Grice’s Cooperative Principle: Meaning and Rationality.” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (12): 2308–2331. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 520 Million Words, 1990-Present. Available online at [URL] (date accessed 01/07/2016).
Francis, W. Nelson, and Henry Kučera. 1964. A Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English, for Use with Digital Computers. Providence, RI: Department of Linguistics, Brown University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fung, Loretta, and Ronald Carter. 2007. “Discourse Markers and Spoken English: Native and Learner use in Pedagogic Settings.” Applied Linguistics 28 (3): 410–439. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garcia McAllister, Paula. 2015. “Speech Acts: A Synchronic Perspective.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin Aijmer, and Christoph Rühlemann, 29–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2009. Statistics for Linguistics with R: A Practical Introduction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael, and Christian Matthiessen. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.). London: Edward Arnold. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heritage, John. 2015. “ Well-Prefaced Turns in English Conversation: A Conversation Analytic Perspective.” Journal of Pragmatics 88 (1): 88–104. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoey, Michael. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen. 2000. “Diachronic Speech Act Analysis: Insults from Flyting to Flaming.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1): 67–95. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “Apologies in the History of English. Routinised and Lexicalised Expressions of Responsibility and Regret.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 229–244. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas, Gerold Schneider, Irma Taavitsainen, and Barb Breustedt. 2008. “Fishing for Compliments: Precision and Recall in Corpus-Linguistic Compliment Research.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 273–294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kallen, Jeffrey, and John Kirk. 2008. ICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kallen Jeffrey, and John Kirk. 2012. SPICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kereckes, Julie. 2007. “The Co-construction of a Gatekeepig Encounter: An Inventory of Verbal Actions.” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (11): 1942–1973. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas. 2008. “Tracing Directives through Text and Time. Towards a Methodology of a Corpus-based Diachronic Speech Act Analysis.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 295–310. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “Speech Acts: A Diachronic Perspective.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin Aijmer, and Christoph Rühlemann, 52–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin. 1974. “Remarks on ‘This’ and ‘That’.” In Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society 10: 345–356Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Steven. 2004. “Deixis.” In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Laurence R. Horn, and Gregory Ward, 97–121. Oxford: Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lindblom, Kenneth. 2001. “Co-operating with Grice: A Cross-disciplinary Metaperspective on Uses of Grice’s Cooperative Principle.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (10): 1601–1623. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Volumes I and II. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCarthy, Michael, and Anne O’Keeffe. 2010. “Historical Perspective: What are Corpora and How have they Evolved?” In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Anne O’Keeffe, and Michael McCarthy, 3–13. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mey, Jacob. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mindt, Dieter. 2000. An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb System. Berlin: Cornelsen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Millar, Sharon. 2015. “Blathering Beauties: The use of Pragmatic Markers in an Irish Beauty Blog.” In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English, ed. by Carolina Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, 292–317. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Norrick, Neal R. 2015. “Interjections.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin Aijmer, and Christoph Rühlemann, 249–273. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Keeffe, Anne, Brian Clancy, and Svenja Adolphs. 2011. Introducing Pragmatics in Use. London: Longman. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Romero-Trillo, Jesús (ed.), 2008. Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics: A Mutualistic Entente. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph. 2007. Conversation in Context: A Corpus-driven Approach. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. “What Can a Corpus Tell us about Pragmatics?” In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Anne O’Keeffe, and Michael McCarthy, 288–301. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph, and Karin Aijmer. 2015. “Corpus Pragmatics: Laying the Foundations.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph, and Stefan Th. Gries. 2015. “Turn Order and Turn Distribution in Multi-party Storytelling.” Journal of Pragmatics 87: 171–191. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell. 2012. “Introducing a Corpus of Conversational Stories. Construction and Annotation of the Narrative Corpus .” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 8 (2): 313–350. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “Deixis.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin Aijmer, and Christoph Rühlemann, 331–359. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schauer, Gila, and Svenja Adolphs. 2006. “Expressions of Gratitude in Corpus and DCT Data: Vocabulary, Formulaic Sequences and Pedagogy.” System 34 (1): 119–134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schneider, Klaus. 2012. “Appropriate Behavior across Varieties of English.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (9): 1022–1037. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinclair, John M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2001. “Preface.” In Small Corpus Studies and ELT: Theory and Practice, ed. by Moshen Ghadessy, Alex Henry, and Robert Roseberry, vii–vxv. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stivers, Tanya. 2007. “Alternative Recognitionals in Initial References to Persons.” In Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Perspectives, ed. by Nick J. Enfield, and Tanya Stivers, 73–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “Coding Social Interaction: A Heretical Approach in Conversation Analysis.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 48 (1): 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tao, Hongyin. 2003. “Turn Initiators in Spoken English: A Corpus-based Approach to Interaction and Grammar.” In Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use, ed. by Pepi Leistyna, and Charles Meyer, 187–208. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vaughan, Elaine, and Brian Clancy. 2013. “Small Corpora and Pragmatics.” The Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 1: 53–73. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (13)

Cited by 13 other publications

Schweinberger, Martin & Michael Haugh
2025. Reproducibility and transparency in interpretive corpus pragmatics. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 30:2 ► pp. 234 ff. DOI logo
Cichosz, Anna, Łukasz Grabowski & Piotr Pęzik
2024. Formulaic language in Old English prose. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:3 ► pp. 467 ff. DOI logo
Bülow, Lars & Marie-Luis Merten
2023. Multimodale Metaphern im Kontext von Internet-Memes. Korpuspragmatische und kognitionslinguistische Zugänge zu einem soziokognitiven Online-Phänomen. In Digitale Pragmatik [Digitale Linguistik, 1], ► pp. 127 ff. DOI logo
Fernández, Julieta
2023. Pragmatics in Learner Corpora. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Meier-Vieracker, Simon, Lars Bülow, Konstanze Marx & Robert Mroczynski
2023. Digitale Pragmatik: Einleitung. In Digitale Pragmatik [Digitale Linguistik, 1], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Bogdanova, Svetlana, Tatyana Krotova & Marina Matytsina
2022. 2022 4th International Conference on Control Systems, Mathematical Modeling, Automation and Energy Efficiency (SUMMA), ► pp. 428 ff. DOI logo
Elewa, Abdelhamid & Hanem El-Farahaty
2022. Linguistic Gender Forms and Deontic Modality in Islamic Legal Translation: A Corpus-Based Study. Corpus Pragmatics 6:3 ► pp. 225 ff. DOI logo
Pascual, Daniel & Pilar Mur-Dueñas
2022. Dialogic interaction with diversified audiences in Twitter for Research Dissemination Purposes. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 90 ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Santos, Giovani
2020. Designing and building SCoPE²: A spoken corpus of Brazilian Portuguese and L2-English. Research in Corpus Linguistics 8 ► pp. 49 ff. DOI logo
Groom, Nicholas
2019. Construction Grammar and the corpus-based analysis of discourses. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:3 ► pp. 291 ff. DOI logo
Norrick, Neal R.
2018. Narrative studies versus pragmatics (of narrative). In Pragmatics and its Interfaces [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 294], ► pp. 121 ff. DOI logo
Tuchen, Astrid
2018. Methodologie der Pragmatik. In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2025. Local Grammar Approaches to Speech Act Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 123], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue