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Small Corpora and Pragmatics

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Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013

Part of the book series: Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics ((YCLP,volume 1))

Abstract

Corpus linguistics is more often than not associated with large-scale collections of spoken or written data, representing genres, varieties or contexts of use. Many of these have been successfully exploited for pragmatics research, producing generalised findings that hold across a range of texts. However, it may be argued that rather than stopping at generalised findings that note the frequency of pragmatic phenomena in large corpora, an important research agenda now foregrounds a focus on small corpora and local pragmatic patterns. This chapter will argue that smaller, carefully collected, context-specific corpora, both spoken and written, are of great import in pragmatics research. Many pragmatic features of language such as deixis or pragmatic markers play a fundamental role in communication, and, in these cases, are linguistically realised in the type of ‘small’ linguistic items that tend to be frequent in all corpora. Therefore, smaller corpora provide a platform for not only establishing the range and frequency of these items but the role of different genres or contexts in characterising their use. We will provide evidence for this in the form of two corpus case studies in order to illustrate how small corpora have created a practical and empirical route for the study of pragmatics, and how this synergy of small corpora and pragmatic research provides rich and contextualised findings.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Almost 15 million words of the ANC are currently available. This is divided into approximately 11.5 million words of written language and 3.5 million words of spoken language (see www.anc.org).

  2. 2.

    There are various frameworks and conceptualisations of ‘community’, such as the ‘speech community’ (e.g. Patrick 2002), ‘discourse community’ (e.g. Swales 1990), or ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). Both of the studies reported on in Sect. 3 operationalise the notion of community of practice.

  3. 3.

    In this research, Tannen examines how speakers in family discourse use the family pet to interact with one another, allowing them ‘to distance themselves figuratively from their own utterances’ (2007: 417), for example, to defuse a potential conflict.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Languages, Literature, Culture and Communication, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Elaine Vaughan

  2. Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Brian Clancy

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  1. Elaine Vaughan
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  2. Brian Clancy
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Correspondence to Elaine Vaughan .

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  1. , Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Autonomous University of Madrid, C/Francisco Tomás y Valiente 1, Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Jesús Romero-Trillo

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Vaughan, E., Clancy, B. (2013). Small Corpora and Pragmatics. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_4

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