Pragmatics: Data trends

Abstract

This paper identifies the trends in the data used in pragmatics studies over the last 20 years, and thereby makes predictions about how pragmatics might develop in the next few years, other things being equal. To establish those trends, 200 papers from the Journal of Pragmatics, covering the period 1999 to 2018, were categorised. The categorisation scheme was designed to capture some of the key ways in which data in pragmatics varies, and included: the general focus of the paper (e.g. whether it is data-driven), the focal point in the data of the analysis, the quantity of the data, the medium of the data, the number of modes or channels represented in the data, the degree of interactivity of the data, the fictionality of the data, and the language of the data (specifically whether it only contains English). Trends discovered include: a continual strong focus on data, a shift of analytical focus towards more macro units, increasing use of greater quantities of data, decreasing dominance of purely spoken data, increasing use of multimodal data, increasing use of more interactive data, decreasing use of constructed examples, no increasing use of fictional data, and the continual diversification of the languages treated.