The initial chapter 19 in this final part by Monika Bednarek, “Approaching the data of pragmatics”, provides an overview of how various aspects of language use are studied using different methodological approaches: intuition, introspection, ethnographic field work, elicitation (and experimentation), and corpus analysis. It compares critically the various methodologies that are employed in areas such as conversation analysis, politeness theory, and speech act theory as well as in re- lated functional approaches. The chapter covers both quantitative and qualitative methodologies ranging from intuition and introspection to interviews, discourse completion tasks, ethnographic field work, elicited data and corpus analysis. It takes a broad approach to ‘the data of pragmatics’ in that it not only includes re- search in key pragmatic areas but also disciplines related to pragmatics such as eth- nography and sociolinguistics. It describes different methodologies and compares the insights gained from them as well as the different perspectives they provide on linguistic data.
In chapter 20, “Experimental pragmatics”, Richard Breheny surveys recent re- search in this emerging field. Experimental pragmatics aims to use the methods of experimental psychology to test claims found in the more theoretical linguistics lit- erature. The strategy of testing theoretical ideas experimentally has been around for a while and is notably exemplified in the work of Clark, Sanford, Gibbs and Glucksberg. More recently, there has been an upturn in the interest in experimental methods, coinciding with renewed interest in pragmatic questions such as the na- ture of generalized implicatures, presupposition, metaphor and the like. Breheny reviews studies involving children, adolescents and adults from clinical popu- lations as well as typically developing groups using the full range of methods to be found in psycholinguistics and developmental psychology (including both beha-
vioral and neuro-scientific methodologies). The contribution also contains a dis- cussion of the difficulty of drawing empirically testable predictions from claims made in the theoretical literature.
The final three chapters in the volume all address the role and forms of corpus data in linguistic pragmatics. The first two consider corpus-based research in pragmatics, first qualitative then quantitative studies, and the third discusses methods of transcription. In chapter 21, “Corpus-based pragmatics I: qualitative studies”, Gisle Andersen describes the practice and potentials of corpus-based re- search in pragmatics, focusing on qualitative approaches to language data. He considers the development of spoken and written corpora like the Brown Corpus, the London-Lund Corpus, the Helsinki Corpus, the British National Corpus, the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English etc., and their growing in- fluence on research in pragmatics over the last thirty years, paying attention to special corpora, large general corpora, continually growing monitor corpora and web-based corpora. Corpora allow for in-depth studies of patterns of frequency, distribution and collocation, thus facilitating statistically based observations of innovative language use and variation. Dynamic and ever-growing corpora allow for the observation of emerging repetitive patterns such as the routinization of forms with discourse marking functions, ongoing grammaticalization and the de- velopment of new abstract and interactional meanings from old forms. In contrast to quantitative, statistical approaches to corpus data, qualitative studies see cor- pora primarily as a source of natural data and a way of overcoming the fallible in- trospection of ‘armchair linguistics’. In the area of qualitative pragmatic studies, corpora have provided a constantly growing pool of data, allowing researchers to test their hypotheses about individual items and constructions, as well as practices and usage within particular groups, but also suggesting new avenues of research. Diachronically oriented corpora are responsible for the rapid progress made in historical pragmatics. At the same time, corpora representing specific groups, genres, registers or stages of a language have led to research of various kinds, in- cluding the language of adolescents, foreign language learners and other user groups.
In the companion chapter 22, “Corpus-based pragmatics II: quantitative studies”, Christoph Rühlemann takes up quantitative corpus-based research. Due to the massive dependence of pragmatic phenomena on context, corpora, as a relatively decontextualized medium, have long been seen by some researchers as unfit for use in pragmatic research. Nonetheless, corpus linguistic analyses, both qualitative and quantitative in orientation, have produced a wealth of new insights into key pragmatic phenomena. The aim of this article is to illustrate key quanti- tative corpus studies into phenomena of pragmatic interest. The article is divided into four sections. Following a brief introduction that addresses general issues in corpus linguistic research on pragmatic phenomena, such as the question of how much or little context-sensitive corpora are, the second section introduces quanti-
tative studies carried out on the small number of corpora that are pragmatically an- notated. The third, and largest, section discusses key corpus linguistic research into pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, deixis, evaluation, discourse marking, backchannelling and vagueness. Further, as a borderline case between pragmatics and semantics, research into semantic prosody will be reviewed. The concluding section looks to the future, outlining inter alia recent attempts at building multi- modal corpora that will potentially shed light on the interplay between utterance and kinesics.
The final contribution 23 deals with various methods of transcribing face-to- face interaction and their significance for pragmatic theorizing. In this chapter, “The transcription of face-to-face interaction”, Roger J. Kreuz and Monica A. Riordan consider issues in the representation of linguistic data. Researchers in pragmatics frequently transcribe audio- or videotaped recordings of conversational participants. A comprehensive transcription coding system would help to unify di- verse lines of research and make collaboration and interpretation of results easier. However, a comprehensive system currently does not exist. Kreuz and Riordan review coding schemes that have been previously proposed and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Most systems have focused solely on the acoustic (i.e., lexical and intonational) aspects of discourse between adult speakers, but they also review systems that have been developed to transcribe the speech of other popu- lations (e.g., children, aphasics and cognitively impaired individuals). In addition, they make recommendations about how non-acoustic information can be coded. Specifically, the challenges and utility of coding for facial and gestural information are addressed. It is hoped that a more comprehensive coding system will make it easier for researchers to describe and study the multimodal aspects of conversa- tional interaction.
Taken together, these chapters constitute an outline of the fundamental issues and trends in the study of pragmatics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They can be taken as a kind of extended definition of the term “pragmatics” as practiced today, along with critical attempts to set down the history of the disci- pline and identify the sorts of questions taken to be important and the sorts of answers being proposed. We hope in this way to contribute to the definition and co- herence of the field, and thereby to foster research in the generation to come.
References
Archer, Dawn and Jonathan Culpeper
2003 Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical cor- pus linguistics. In: Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson, and Tony McEnery (eds.),
Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, 37–58.
Cappelen, Herman and Ernie Lepore
2005 Insensitive Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, Robyn
2002 Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Ox-
ford: Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope
2000 Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Fairclough, Norman
1995 Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman.
Goodwin, Charles
2003 Pointing as situated practice. In: Sotaro Kita (ed.), Pointing: Where Language,
Culture, and Cognition Meet, 217–242. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Grice, Herbert Paul
1975 Logic and Conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.). Syntax and
Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Halliday, Michael A.K.
1978 Language as Social Semiotic. London: Arnold.
Hanks, William
1996 Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Horn, Lawrence R.
1984 Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based impli- cature. In: Deborah Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Lin-
guistic Applications, 11–42. Washington DC.: Georgetown University Press.
Huang, Yan
2007 Pragmatics. Oxford: University Press.
Hymes, Dell
1962 The ethnography of speaking. In: Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant (eds.), Anthropology and Human Behavior, 13–53. Washington: Anthropologi- cal Society.
Leech, Geoffrey
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Levinson, Stephen
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: University Press.
Levinson, Stephen
2000 Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implica- ture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McNamara, Tim and Carsten Roever
2006 The social dimension of proficiency: How testable is it? Language Learning 56/2: 43–79.
Mey, Jacob L.
1979 Introduction. In: Jacob L. Mey (ed.), Pragmalinguistics. Theory and Practice, 10–17. The Hague: Mouton.
Mey, Jacob L.
1993 Pragmatics. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mey, Jacob L.
2000 When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de
Morris, Charles
1938 Foundations of the Theory of Signs. In: Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris (eds.). International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science, 77–138. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prucha, Jan
1983 Pragmalinguistics: East European Approaches. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson
1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Thomas, Jenny
1995 Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Wenger, Etienne
1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cam-