ABSTRACT
Although corpus linguistics has become a central methodology for second language acquisition research, relatively less work has focused on the area of second language (L2) pragmatics. In part, this is related to the fact that there are relatively fewer corpus linguistic studies of pragmatics in general (outside of L2 pragmatics) and fewer spoken than written corpora, meaning that methodologies within corpus linguistics for investigating pragmatics are newer and less well developed (Aijmer & Rühlemann, 2014). As Callies (2013) discusses, the relative lack of corpus-based L2 pragmatics research may also be related to the rather narrow focus of L2 pragmatics research on speech acts, which are difficult to identify (and may not even occur) in large corpus data sets. To explore the current state of corpus-based L2 pragmatics research and posit possibilities for future research, then, this chapter takes a broader view of pragmatic research, including not only speech acts and the challenges faced when identifying them in corpora, but also other aspects such as discourse organization and interactive communication (e.g., discourse markers) that are more commonly found in corpus-based studies, the use of pragmatic markers such as stance features, the use of prosody and non-verbal behavior, the use of formulas for pragmatic purposes (e.g., discourse organization and stance), and functional approaches to corpus linguistics that have implications for research in pragmatics. We begin with an overview of corpus linguistic methodology and corpus-based approaches to pragmatics research and then move to a survey of the corpus-based research focusing on L2 pragmatics followed by a critical reflection on this research. We end with a discussion of future research directions and provide suggestions for further reading.
