Abstract
This volume is the first in a new series edited by Romero-Trillo and entitled Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics. It has 12 chapters, organized around three main parts, followed by two book reviews and an author and subject index. It starts with the editor’s Introduction, which states that recently ‘many scholars have trodden the narrow path between corpus linguistics and pragmatics’ (p. 1). The aim of the volume is to showcase some of the latest developments in this area.
The first part of the volume is devoted to current theoretical issues in pragmatics and corpus linguistics research. Callies explores the notion of interlanguage pragmatics. After a useful introduction on the link between pragmatics and second language acquisition (SLA), he presents two case studies based on the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage, one on emphatic do and the other on demonstrative clefts. Walsh considers the interface of corpus linguistics and conversation analysis which, despite ontological and epistemological differences, are shown to be complementary. This is illustrated by a study of the linguistic, interactional and pedagogic features of academic spoken English. Vaughan and Clancy advocate the use of small, domain-specific corpora for the study of pragmatics. Such corpora, they argue, contain a manageable quantity of data and provide information about context, as shown by their analysis of we in small corpora of family and workplace discourse.
Part II, ‘New Domains for Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics’, opens with a chapter by Erman, Lewis and Fant, which presents and compares three methods to extract and analyse multiword units (MWUs), two of which are applied to the same material of first (L1) and second language (L2) Spanish and English. Despite its potential relevance for researchers in pragmatics, the chapter unfortunately does not bridge the gap all the way from corpus linguistics to pragmatics, making only sparse reference to pragmatic features. The next chapter, by Lin, also deals with MWUs, which results in some overlap between the two chapters, especially in their theoretical considerations. The link with pragmatics is more evident here, however, as Lin’s comparison of online and spoken intercultural communication involves identifying the most frequent MWUs, but also categorizing them according to their functions, many of which are directly related to pragmatic competence. Knight, Adolphs and Carter compare hedges in the Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus and in written and spoken data from the British National Corpus, in an attempt to determine the degree of formality of e-language. While the conclusion that e-language should be viewed as a genre of its own seems perfectly sensible, the exclusively quantitative and form-based approach inevitably limits the scope of the study. De Felice’s chapter is also concerned with e-language, more precisely business email communication, in which the speech act of commitment is examined. By looking at its main lexico-grammatical features, De Felice proposes a revised description, thus leading to new theoretical developments.
Part III deals with ‘New Methodologies for the Pragmatic Analysis of Speech through Corpora’. Amador-Moreno, McCarthy and O’Keeffe investigate whether frameworks developed for English can be applied to the study of Spanish. They focus on response tokens, that is, small words like vale or claro, underlining the listener’s active role in conversation. Romero-Trillo is not only the editor of the series and the volume, but also the author of the next chapter, which introduces the Corpus of Language and Nature. This project examines the relationship between cognition and emotion in language by collecting reactions to photographs of natural landscapes. Although the possible study of pragmatics is mentioned, the chapter is really about the compilation of the corpus, and particularly the informants’ biographical profiles, rather than the analysis of certain linguistic features. Riesco-Bernier’s chapter is not specifically devoted to data analysis either, but presents a tool – the Regulatory Functions System Network – intended for the investigation of directives in a corpus of English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher talk. Riesco-Bernier describes its creation, adaptation and assessment. In the final chapter, Gladkova conducts a cultural semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of two Russian praise words, molodec and umnica. On the basis of examples from the Russian National Corpus, and relying on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, she identifies the main distinctive features of each word, relates their meanings to Russian culture, and compares them with similar expressions in English and Chinese.
The volume offers a wide variety of perspectives on the corpus-based study of (discursive) pragmatics and thus illustrates the benefits of this approach. At the same time, however, it points to the difficulty of combining a rigorous corpus methodology with a thorough pragmatic analysis. In addition to a couple of papers whose pragmatic orientation is unclear, several chapters privilege either the rigour of the corpus analysis (detailed quantitative investigation of large sets of data but rather superficial pragmatic assessment) or the sophistication of the pragmatic account (in-depth pragmatic examination of small samples of data). The lack of precise knowledge about the context, which is characteristic of many corpora, may also threaten the pragmatic interpretation of the data, as underlined by De Felice.
Most of the chapters start with a review of the literature and definitions of some basic concepts relevant to the theme under study, which makes the book accessible to novice scholars – although its subtitle, New Domains and Methodologies, is perhaps more likely to attract experienced scholars. SLA specialists should also find it a good read, as it includes many references to acquisitional pragmatics, starting with Callies’ paper – a slightly surprising but interesting choice for the opening chapter.
While the volume could have benefited from some more polishing (e.g. to correct a number of typos or improve the readability of some figures), it will undoubtedly open up new perspectives for researchers in pragmatics who want to empirically support their claims or corpus linguists who want to tackle the challenging domain of pragmatics.