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Article published In:
Thematic issue: Trends in Second Language Pragmatics Research Part I
[Applied Pragmatics 4:2] 2022
► pp. 178–198

Corpus linguistics in L2 pragmatics research

ORCID logo | University of Arizona

In second language acquisition, corpus linguistics (CL) enjoys prominence as a methodology valuable for its descriptive power in the textual analysis of patterns. Within second language (L2) pragmatics, CL has been increasingly influential in shaping our understanding of learners’ pragmatic capacities and articulating new insights and possibilities. In this narrative review, I take a broad view of corpora in L2 pragmatics research with a focus on automatization, size, representativeness, temporal design, and annotation. This is followed by a review of representative research highlighting language proficiency, prosodic pragmatics, pragmatic particles and oral fluency, and pragmatics pedagogy. I conclude with future directions where the discussion centers on bringing CL and other methodologies together for pragmatic analysis and extending the use of these methodologies to more L2 pragmatic learning contexts.

Keywords: learner corpus research, corpus linguistics, pragmatic annotation, prosodic pragmatics, pragmatic markers, speech acts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The use of corpora in L2 pragmatics research
  • 3.Review of representative research in learner corpus pragmatics
    • 3.1Comparison of L1 and L2 pragmatic performance
    • 3.2Language proficiency
    • 3.3Prosodic pragmatics
    • 3.4Pragmatic particles and spoken fluency
    • 3.5Pragmatics instruction
  • 4.Future directions
    • 4.1Combination of corpus linguistics with other methodologies for pragmatic analysis
    • 4.2Extension of contexts for L2 pragmatic learning
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 13 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.00008.fer
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