Corpus pragmatics: laying the foundations

Abstract

Corpus pragmatics is a relative newcomer on the pragmatic and the corpuslinguistic scene. For a long time pragmatics and corpus linguistics were regarded as ‘parallel but often mutually exclusive’ (Romero-Trillo 2008: 2). However, in recent years corpus linguists and pragmaticists have actively begun exploring their common ground. This is attested, for example, by the 2004 special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics dedicated to corpus linguistics, the 2007 IPrA conference on ‘Pragmatics, corpora and computational linguistics’, the 2008 ICAME conference on ‘Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse’, and a number of recent monographs and edited collections (e.g., Adolphs 2008, Romero-Trillo 2008, Felder et al. 2011, Jucker and Taavitsainen 2014). In this introduction we will discuss how pragmatics and corpus linguistics can profit from each other. The focus will be on the methodologies that are key to the two fields and how they can be integrated into corpus-pragmatic research. To begin with, our use of the term pragmatics needs to be defined (Section 0.2). This will be followed in Section 0.3 by a discussion of the basic characteristics of corpus linguistics. In Section 0.4 we outline how corpus pragmatics can be seen as an intersection of corpus linguistics and pragmatics. In the last section, Section 0.5, we aim to introduce the individual contributions to this handbook in brief detail.