ABSTRACT
Language forms develop in order to communicate complex meanings. Learners’ pragmatic needs drive their additional language (L2) development. This chapter addresses an area that highlights the importance of meaning making in L2 learning which has been investigated using corpora: L2 pragmatics. The scope of research in L2 pragmatics has broadened widely from an initial focus mainly on speech acts to many different aspects involved in the development of L2 pragmatic capacities, as well as a revision of some fundamental concepts. Within L2 pragmatics, proficiency has been extensively studied as one of the central sources of individual variation in learners’ pragmatic performance. The chapter demonstrates some of the contributions corpora can make to functional perspectives on L2 learning with a focus on L2 pragmatics. Similar to other pragmatic approaches, move analysis focuses on contextualization of language use and its functions. For future research in this area, collaboration between pragmatics scholars and computational linguists appears to be a necessity.
