ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to introduce core areas of pragmatic research and offers practical tasks, allowing the reader to carry out small corpus-pragmatic research projects. Pragmatic markers, typically placed utterance-initially, play an important role in the front-loading bias whereby speech act indicators are placed early in the utterance; also, the functions of markers vary with the way they are realized phonologically. Evaluation is far from restricted to one class of speech acts but arguably permeates every act of speech in some form, be it lexically, grammatically, phonologically, or gesturally. Multimodal corpora are undoubtedly the way forward in corpus pragmatics. In general, the obstacles to getting a corpus-linguistic handle on the complexity of multimodal communication cannot be exaggerated. While a multimodal corpus designed for form-to-function analysis already poses serious challenges for transcription and annotation, a corpus designed for function-to-form analysis would pose even greater challenges, requiring excessive amounts of manual annotation by linguistically highly trained personnel.
