Corpus Pragmatics and Second Language Pragmatics: A Mutualistic Entente in Theory and Practice

Abstract

Ten years after the publication of the volume ‘Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente’ (Romero-Trillo, in: Romero-Trillo (ed) Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2008), this article intends to delve into the mutualistic relationship between Corpus Pragmatics and Second Language (henceforth L2) Pragmatics. The underlying hypothesis is that to master an L2 a learner needs to adopt a new social, cultural and linguistic identity, and that the difficulty during the process is that the pragmatic features of the L2 do not necessarily match those of the first language (henceforth L1). This is the reason why, in the process of L2 learning, speakers may reach the state of pragmatic fossilisation, with a near-to-native grammatical and lexical competence but with a limited range of pragmatic resources (Romero-Trillo in J Pragmat 34: 769–784, 2002). Recent studies have benefited from the support of corpora to investigate L2 learners’ pragmatics as an invaluable tool to test the constructs of pragmatic theories with real data (Romero-Trillo in Corpus Pragmat 1: 1–2, 2017); Maguire and Romero-Trillo, in: Kecskes, Assimakopoulos (eds) Current issues in intercultural pragmatics, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2017). The present study has three objectives: (1) to describe the theoretical concepts behind the notion of L2 pragmatics with a critical survey of the current literature; (2) to describe how corpus pragmatics has an overarching function in L2 pragmatic development; and (3) to analyse some essential insights of L2 pragmatic development, with particular reference to the role of prosody. The final section will offer suggestions for future research with practical implications for both theoretical and applied linguists.