Abstract
This study addresses a familiar challenge in corpus pragmatic research: the search for functional phenomena in large electronic corpora. Speech acts are one area of research that falls into this functional domain and the question of how to identify them in corpora has occupied researchers over the past 20 years. This study focuses on apologies as a speech act that is characterised by a standard set of routine expressions, making it easier to search for with corpus linguistic tools. Nevertheless, even for a comparatively formulaic speech act, such as apologies, the polysemous nature of forms (cf. e.g. I am sorry vs. a sorry state) impacts the precision of the search output so that previous studies of smaller data samples had to resort to manual microanalysis. In this study, we introduce an innovative methodological approach that demonstrates how the combination of different types of collocational analysis can facilitate the study of speech acts in larger corpora. By first establishing a collocational profile for each of the Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices associated with apologies and then scrutinising their shared and unique collocates, unwanted hits can be discarded and the amount of manual intervention reduced. Thus, this article introduces new possibilities in the field of corpus-based speech act analysis and encourages the study of pragmatic phenomena in large corpora.
Highlights
One of the main challenges when approaching the study of pragmatic phenomena, such as speech acts, in large corpora is that they cannot, for the most part, be identified automatically
Scholars resorted to smaller data samples (e.g. Koester 2002; Garcia McAllister 2015), eclectic analyses of common forms or patterns associated with a speech act, or they referred to metacommunicative expression analysis, all of which generally demanded stages of manual microanalysis to separate unwanted hits from examples with specific pragmatic functions
Our current study has opened a window on new methodological possibilities in corpus-based speech act analysis that is needed in corpus pragmatics as it allows us ‘‘to see the larger picture’’ and move ‘‘from the individual richly contextualized example to large numbers of similar examples’’ (Jucker 2013)
Summary
One of the main challenges when approaching the study of pragmatic phenomena, such as speech acts, in large corpora is that they cannot, for the most part, be identified automatically. We show how collocational analysis can be used to facilitate the extraction of the speech act of apology by distinguishing forms with the illocutionary force of an apology from other uses of the same forms. To this end, we use the Birmingham Blog Corpus (BBC 2010), a diachronicallystructured corpus comprising 630 million words of both blog posts and comments from the period 2000 to 2010. Given the nature of our data, the results, in addition to demonstrating how the speech act of apology can be identified in a corpus of this size, provide insights into the areas in which bloggers and their readers see a need for apologising as well as into the distribution and clustering of specific types of apologies in blog posts versus comments
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