Aijmer, K. & Rühlemann, C.: Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook

Abstract

Corpus pragmatics is an emerging field that, over the past decade or so, has received increasing attention from linguists. The reviewed volume is the first handbook under this sub-discipline, bringing together a multitude of studies investigating pragmatic features with corpus linguistic methods. As such, it is of interest to newcomers to the field of corpus pragmatics on all academic levels as well as scholars from any field that are interested in new approaches. The chapters are great resources on individual pragmatic features and can be used as stand-alone references with the handbook as a whole serving as a remarkable collection of avenues taken within this new discipline. Pragmatics, fully established in the late 1970s, investigates how language is used for communicative purposes. It, therefore, includes foci not on the literal meanings of words and sentences alone, but also on social and cultural readings of the utterances and their speakers. Research within pragmatics usually follows a ''horizontal reading'' of text (further detailed in the introductory chapter, p. 3), meaning close analyses of the immediate linguistic context of an utterance in which it appears as well as broader situational contexts. With such intricate analyses needed, data for pragmatic research has usually been quite limited to very specific text samples. The broad-sweeping comparisons across different texts have hence been difficult. The utterance-context specific interpretations seemingly limited the field to small-scale analyses-that is, until corpus linguistics found ways to not only comprise large amounts of language data, but also offer specialised corpora with sophisticated methods of annotation accommodating to the needs of pragmatics. More and more corpora are constructed that include not just text fragments, but whole texts, providing background information on speakers and listeners, as well as situational and conversational contexts (cf. Chapman 2011: 187). Further, with