How to Do Corpus Pragmatics on Pragmatically Annotated Data

What is it about?

This book introduces a methodology and research tool (DART) that make it possible to carry out advanced corpus pragmatics research using dialogue corpora enriched with pragmatics-relevant annotations. It first explores the general use of spoken corpora for pragmatics research, as well as issues revolving around their representation and annotation, and then goes on to describe the resources required for such an annotation process. Based on data from three different corpora, ranging from highly constrained, task-oriented, ones (SPAADIA Trainline & Trains 93) to unconstrained dialogues (Switchboard), it next presents an in-depth discussion and illustration of the potential contributions of syntax, semantics, and semantico-pragmatics towards pragmatic force. This is followed by a description of the largely automatic annotation process itself, and finally an analysis of how a set of more than 110 potential speech acts defined in DART contributes towards establishing the specific communicative characteristics of the three corpora.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This is the first book to introduce a novel approach to corpus pragmatics through the use of data that has been annotated for a number of pragmatics-relevant features. Apart from this, it also introduces a new (and growing) speech-act taxonomy that comprises more than 120 categories that not only makes it possible to describe most aspects of spoken interaction, but also to establish communicative profiles for individual speakers, speaker groups or whole corpora.