ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how pragmatic aspects can be captured through various corpus methods. Moreover, through this work people produce a preliminary characterisation of the pragmatics of target data. It highlights pragmatic variation according to English variety, whether UK English, US English, Indian English, or Philippine English. This focus echoes trends within the field of pragmatics. Since the late 1970s, studies have focused on cross-cultural pragmatics, revealing how pragmatic aspects differ according to culture. Often, cultures were treated as monolithic blocks that correlated with languages. Thus 'German culture' might be compared with 'English culture'. The chapter focuses on very different types of pragmatic phenomena and, moreover, types that present different problems and solutions for the corpus method: forms conventionally enriched with pragmatic meanings, metapragmatic comments and labels, and speech acts and speech-act sequences. Each section will begin with brief notes on the pragmatic phenomenon in hand and will then describe the methodological approach before moving on to the analysis.
