“I’m really sorry about what I said”

This paper presents a local grammar of thanking in English, aiming to further demonstrate the feasibility of using a local grammar approach to account for speech acts and also to contribute to the on-going development of corpus pragmatics. The corpus used for the study is compiled of those texts categorised as ‘Spoken—conversation’ in the British National Corpus. Conventionalised realisations of thanking are identified and used as search terms to retrieve automatically instances of thanking. The retrieved instances are then manually examined to make sure that all instances to be analysed have the illocutionary force of thanking. The subsequent analyses suggest 7 functional labels that are needed for a local grammar description of gratitude expressions and identify 29 local grammar patterns. The implications and applications of research on local grammars of speech acts are discussed. It is concluded that local grammars can contribute substantially to the description of speech act realisations, and therefore more research on local grammars of speech acts are desirable and valuable.

Local grammars of speech acts: An exploratory study

Local grammar approaches to speech acts in Chinese: A case study of exemplification

HeikoNarrogBerndHeineGrammaticalization2021Oxford University PressOxford432 pp., ISBN 978-0198748540, £29.99 (paperback)

This study explores the viability of applying the local grammar approach to speech act studies beyond English by developing a local grammar of apology in Italian. Drawing on data taken from the spoken Italian corpus of KIPTO, we identified nine functional terms that are commonly associated with the semantics of apologies in Italian. We subsequently used these terms to analyse instances of apologies from a local grammar perspective, leading to the identification of 18 local grammar patterns of apology, with the pattern “Forgiveness-seeking” being the most prominent one. We further discussed the opportunities (e.g., facilitating cross-linguistic speech act studies) and challenges (e.g., corpus availability, identification of speech act instances in corpora) of using the local grammar approach to account for speech acts in languages other than English. Overall, our argument is, and our study shows, that local grammars can be a viable approach to speech act studies in and across various languages.

This book brings together corpus linguistics and pragmatics by extending the emerging corpus analytic framework of local grammar to speech act research, aiming to enrich the toolkit of corpus-based speech act studies. It outlines four directions in which local grammar can be useful for investigating speech acts, namely, a local grammar approach to annotating speech acts, developing local grammars of speech acts, identifying speech act constructions via the lens of local grammars, and applying local grammars into contrastive speech act studies. These directions are illustrated with studies on apology in contemporary spoken British English, which shows that local grammar can be an innovative approach to advance speech act studies and that such research has significant implications and applications. The book should be of interest to researchers and students in corpus linguistics, pragmatics, construction grammar, and L2 speech act research and teaching.

This paper proposes a method that is designed to facilitate diachronic speech act analysis. The proposed method draws on the corpus linguistic concept of local grammar – an approach which seeks to account for, not the whole of a language, but one meaning or function only. Local grammar descriptions capture both formal and semantic regularities of speech act realisations, and local grammars offer a more reliable way to quantify speech act realisations across time. It is particularly in this respect that it is argued that a local grammar approach can be useful for diachronic speech act studies, which is demonstrated subsequently by tracing one particular speech act, namely “apology”, in a sample of the Corpus of Historical American English (coha).

This paper explores the applications of pattern grammar and local grammar in English language teaching, focusing specifically on the design of teaching materials. It shows that grammar patterns can be systematically analysed from a local grammar perspective, and further argues that the practice of local grammar analyses helps to raise language learners’ awareness of the patterned nature of language in use and the close association between patterns and meanings. These in turn offer insights into materials writing. A sample coursebook unit is then offered to exemplify how pattern grammar and local grammar can be applied to derive pedagogical materials for English language teaching.

Local grammars and discourse acts in academic writing: A case study of exemplification in Linguistics research articles

The study extends the concept of local grammar to the study of disclaimers in company reports. It also outlines and illustrates an analytical procedure to provide a means of interpreting the local grammar of specific language use. Data analysis has identified 18 functional categories and 13 lexico-grammatical patterns in the disclaimers examined. Functional category labels, including ‘creator of disclaimer’, ‘claim carrier’, ‘risks’, ‘nature of thing denied’, and ‘restriction on dependence/use’, were created to directly reflect the discourse functions of the language elements. Based on frequency, the study identifies the canonical pattern, together with its variants, of the local grammar, representing the prototype of the linguistic elements, of the disclaimers. The study contributes to the research of local grammars, affirming the view of previous studies that adopting a local grammar approach, compared with a general grammar, makes analyses of texts of specific language use more simple, precise and useful.

This study explores the applicability of local grammar in critical discourse analysis, which is demonstrated by an investigation into the discursive representation of climate change. Using UN climate change news as the data, the study shows that climate change was typically construed as ‘Problem’, ‘Cause’, ‘Definiendum’ and ‘Effect’, and a close examination of the semantic roles of climate change reveals how the UN conceptualised the changing climate and urged the public to act on climate change. Overall, the study shows that local grammar can facilitate the identification of semantic roles of discourse phenomena, which in turn contributes to exploring the association between discourse practice and social reality. It is thus concluded that local grammar could be a viable approach to critical discourse studies.

“We define X as …”: A local grammar of definition in linguistics research articles and its pedagogical value

As local grammar starts to receive attention in the field of corpus linguistics, this study examines the local grammar of the speech act of complimenting. Utilizing the corpus from the first three seasons of Modern Family, the research identifies ten functional categories, revealing both commonalities and individualities in their use based on explicit and implicit strategies. A total of 31 explicit compliment patterns and 2 implicit ones are classified. The application of local grammar offers a clear and holistic perspective, enriching corpus pragmatics and providing communicative instructions for EFL and ESL learners.

Applying local grammars to the diachronic investigation of discourse acts in academic writing: The case of exemplification in Linguistics research articles

On the trail of the pied-piper and alternative routes: Diverging approaches to linguistic analysis