ABSTRACT
This chapter presents corpus pragmatic studies selectively; only a few key studies in key pragmatic fields can be presented. The focus in the chapter will be on one type of evaluation that, many corpus linguists claim, can only be revealed using corpus linguistic methods: semantic prosody. Moreover, corpus research has been able to exploit corpus annotations of overlap as a resource to investigate other turn-taking phenomena such as backchannels. Corpus evidence, by contrast, suggests a view of speech act expressions which emphasises the role less of inferences but more of collocational patterning. To conclude, multi-modal corpus linguistics ‘is very much in its infancy’. However, since this strand of research offers intriguing prospects for a deeper understanding and better description of how speakers mean more than they say, the construction, annotation and exploitation of multi-modal corpora may in future become a major site of corpus pragmatic research.
