ABSTRACT
Pragmatics deals with the study of language in use, its functional behavior and the role of context in the choice of linguistic forms and the expression of meanings. Therefore, the corpus linguistic approach is essential for a study of pragmatic nature. In particular, corpora of spoken language which allow access to full texts offer authentic materials. They are produced in a natural way not specifically for research purposes, and they are accompanied by contextual and sociolinguistic information. It is rich empiric material for pragmatic analysis. In Spanish, there 224already exist many free-access corpora with such characteristics. This chapter has two main objectives. First, to explain why corpus linguistics is an ideal and extremely beneficial tool for answering research questions in pragmatics. Second, to show the usefulness of the spoken language corpus based on a review of some of the main results in the investigation of Spanish pragmatic phenomena. Recently, the designation of corpus pragmatics has been extended to refer to a new discipline that combines the objectives of corpus linguistics (quantitative) and pragmatics (originally qualitative), which for a long time have been considered mutually exclusive. The present study will show that doing research on pragmatic phenomena such as indirectness in speech acts, attenuation and intensification, verbal politeness, discursive markers, interactional management, etc. require both a qualitative and quantitative approach.
