Contrastive Pragmatics and Corpora

Karin Aijmer

doi:10.1163/26660393-12340004

Abstract

Abstract Contrastive pragmatics is closely associated with the use of parallel and comparable corpora for studying the similarities and differences between languages. Parallel corpora have now been extended to more than two languages making them more relevant for typological research, and they can be used to investigate whether there are (discourse) universals across languages. Contrastive pragmatic studies also need to take into account aspects of the communication situation and the social and cultural context. As a result, many contrastive studies nowadays are doubly contrastive in that they compare pragmatic phenomena across both genres and languages. Scholars have also begun to combine contrastive analysis (translations) with the diachronic analysis of pragmatic phenomena in historical corpora, and pragmatic phenomena are studied contrastively with the focus being on sociolinguistic aspects. Illustrating these new uses is a case study which compares English absolutely with Swedish absolut.

Highlights

The aim of this article is to give an update on the state of the art in contrastive pragmatics and corpora
‘Contrastive corpus pragmatics’ can be regarded as a new field of research characterised by the joint approaches of pragmatics, corpus linguistics and contrastive analysis for describing the similarities and differences between languages
Ferguson (1981), for example, analysed the patterns of response given to greetings in English and Syracuse Arabic, and Coulmas (1981) examined the use of the routinised speech acts thanks and apologies by drawing on material from a number of European languages and Japanese in a study which he described as “theoretically grounded in contrastive pragmatics” (Coulmas, 1981: 69)

Summary

Introduction

The aim of this article is to give an update on the state of the art in contrastive pragmatics and corpora. ‘Contrastive corpus pragmatics’ can be regarded as a new field of research characterised by the joint approaches of pragmatics, corpus linguistics and contrastive analysis for describing the similarities and differences between languages. Contrastive studies of pragmatic phenomena can be situated within different theoretical frameworks such as functional theories of cohesion, speech act analysis and discourse analysis.. Contrastive studies of pragmatic phenomena can be situated within different theoretical frameworks such as functional theories of cohesion, speech act analysis and discourse analysis.1 They overlap in their concerns with other disciplines dealing with language comparison such as cross-cultural pragmatics (Wierzbicka, 2003), variational pragmatics (Schneider and Barron, 2008; Barron and Schneider, 2009), intercultural pragmatics (Kecskes, 2017) and ‘learner corpora and pragmatics’ (Vyatkina and Cunningham, 2015). The discussion of corpus-based contrastive pragmatics in this article is organised in the following way.

Methodology

A Case Study of English absolutely and Swedish absolut