Corpus Pragmatics

Landert, Daniela; Dayter, Daria; Messerli, Thomas C.; Locher, Miriam A.

doi:10.1017/9781009091107

Cited by 13 publications

References 102 publications

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Politeness Variation: Politeness in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong

Xie

2024

Corpus Pragmatics

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British culture is often characterized by off-record or negative politeness (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1987; Ogiermann, 2009) and norms giving prominence to social distance (van Dorst et al., 2024). It is worth exploring whether other English varieties exhibit similar characteristics within the field of variational pragmatics. This paper presents a corpus-based study that investigates politeness variation in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong. This study seeks empirical evidence regarding variations among British English, Australian English, and Hong Kong English in terms of three different politeness types: tentativeness, deference, and solidarity, and three different levels of formality: informal, neutral, and formal. Twenty-one frequently occurred formulaic expressions regularly associated with politeness are chosen and retrieved from the GB, AU, and HK components of the GloBwE Corpus. A close analysis of the results revealed significant differences across politeness types and levels of formality among the three English varieties. Australian English exhibits the highest relative frequency of deference politeness, solidarity politeness, and both informal and formal politeness formulae, followed by British English, with Hong Kong English showing the least. In contrast, Hong Kong English has the highest relative frequency of tentativeness politeness and neutral formality politeness formulae. This study finds that several factors may influence the use of three politeness types and three levels of formalities, including urbanization level, population density, settings, culture, and pragmatic transfer. Overall, this study examines politeness variation in British, Australian, and Hong Kong English using corpus-based methods, contributing to both variational pragmatics and corpus pragmatics.

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Politeness Variation: Politeness in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong

Xie

2024

Corpus Pragmatics

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Pragmatics, Utterance Meaning, and Representational Gesture

Wilson

2024

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Humans produce utterances intentionally. Visible bodily action, or gesture, has long been acknowledged as part of the broader activity of speaking, but it is only recently that the role of gesture during utterance production and comprehension has been the focus of investigation. If we are to understand the role of gesture in communication, we must answer the following questions: Do gestures communicate? Do people produce gestures with an intention to communicate? This Element argues that the answer to both these questions is yes. Gestures are (or can be) communicative in all the ways language is. This Element arrives at this conclusion on the basis that communication involves prediction. Communicators predict the behaviours of themselves and others, and such predictions guide the production and comprehension of utterance. This Element uses evidence from experimental and neuroscientific studies to argue that people produce gestures because doing so improves such predictions.

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Pragmatic Inference

Elder

2024

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The concept of inference is foundational to the study of pragmatics; however, the way it is theoretically conceptualised and methodologically operationalised is far from uniform. This Element investigates the role that inference plays in pragmatic models of communication, bringing together a range of scholarship that characterises inference in different ways for different purposes. It addresses the nature of 'faulty inferences', promoting the study of misunderstandings as crucial for understanding inferential processes, and looking at sociopragmatic issues such as the role of commitment, accountability and deniability of inferences in interpersonal communication. This Element highlights that the question of where the locus of meaning lies is not only relevant to pragmatic theory but is also of paramount importance for understanding and managing real-life interpersonal communication conflict.

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Corpus Pragmatics

Cited by 13 publications

References 102 publications

Politeness Variation: Politeness in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong

Politeness Variation: Politeness in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong

Pragmatics, Utterance Meaning, and Representational Gesture

Pragmatic Inference

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