Karin Aijmer

English corpus linguistics : studies in honour of Jan Svartvik

Part 1 Goals and methods: the state of the art in corpus linguistics, Geoffrey Leech corpus studies and probabilistic grammar, M.A.K.Halliday intuition-based and observation-based grammars, Jan Aarts. Part 2 Corpus design and development: toward a new corpus of spoken American English, Wallace L.Chafe, et al the development of the international corpus of English. Part 3 Exploration of corpora: between and through - the company they keep and the functions they serve, Graeme Kennedy a mint of phrases, Goran Kjellmer collocational frameworks in English, Antoinette Renouf and John McH.Sinclair the modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English, Peter Collins a corpus-based study of apposition in English, Charles F.Meyer syntactic evidence for semantic distinctions in English, Dieter Mindt on having a look in a corpus, Gabriele Stein and Randolph Quirk on the exploitation of computerized corpora in variation studies, Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan stylistic profiling, David Crystal expletives in the London-Lund corpus, Anna-Brita Stenstrom conversational style in British and American English - the case of backchannels, Gunnel Tottie on the history of that/zero as object clause links in English, Matti Rissanen a point of verb syntax in South-western British English - an analysis of a dialect continuum, Ossi Ihalainen. Part 4 Prospects for the future: times change, and so do corpora, Stig Johansson. Appendix: List of computer corpora.

The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs

This book provides a detailed account of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of modal adverbs of certainty in present-day English. Methodologically it relies on three types of data: monolingual corpora, translation corpora and informant testing. It is the first study in which the semantic field of certainty as realised by English adverbs is explored.

Themes and Tails: The Discourse Functions of Dislocated Elements

The article deals with Themes (the function associated with left-dislocated structures) and Tails (the function associated with right-dislocated structures) in English conversation. The noun phrase is placed as Theme in “our maths chap he is an Indian” and as Tail in “they very often are these Eastern Europeans”. It is shown that Themes and Tails are functionally different phenomena. Themes are explained interactionally in terms of the negotiation of information which takes place between speaker and hearer, while Tails are associated with the interpersonal or polite function of speech.

Swedish Modal Particles in a Contrastive Perspective.

Abstract A contrastive methodology is used for studying how certain functions tend to cooccur and for mapping the fuzzy boundaries between modal particles in Swedish. The particles are described as evidentials with meanings referring to the source of knowledge and to the type and strength of evidence. It is argued that all aspects of the meanings of the Swedish modal particles cannot be analysed as modal but that the particles also need to be explained in a general theory of human communication.

Pragmatics of society

Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

Modal adverbs of certainty and uncertainty in an English-Swedish perspective

The larger theoretical question addressed in this study is whether we find a parallel development from certainty to uncertainty in several languages. My contribution to this question is a case study of surely, certainly and no doubt on the basis of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. It is shown that in English, Swedish, German, Norwegian (and French), expressions of certainty can also perform the opposite function of ’uncertainty’. The regularity of this development is explained in terms of grammaticalization. It is argued that it may be useful to distinguish a subsystem of modal particles/discourse particles in English including certainly, surely which is derived by grammaticalization. The seeds of this development may be modally harmonious combinations of modal auxiliaries and adverbs. The translations in the corpus are used as a tool to disambiguate the meanings of strong and weak certainty in the source language items.

“So er I just sort I dunno I think it’s just because…”: A corpus study of I don’t know and dunno in learners’ spoken English

The aim of this study is to investigate if I don’t know and (I) dunno are used in the same way by learners and by native speakers. The data come from the Swedish component of the recently compiled LINDSEI corpus of spoken learner texts. A comparison is made with native speaker data from the LOCNEC corpus. I don’t know (dunno) is characteristically multifunctional and needs to be described with regard to parameters like involvement (epistemic and affective stance), speech-management and politeness. I don’t know (dunno) can also be used to take or yield the turn or to mark the opening or closing of a topic. The comparison between native speakers and learners shows that learners over-whelmingly use I don’t know (dunno) as a speech management signal. Native speakers use I don’t know mainly to avoid asking questions in a direct way.

Corpus Pragmatics: Corpus pragmatics: laying the foundations

Corpus pragmatics is a relative newcomer on the pragmatic and the corpuslinguistic scene. For a long time pragmatics and corpus linguistics were regarded as ‘parallel but often mutually exclusive’ (Romero-Trillo 2008: 2). However, in recent years corpus linguists and pragmaticists have actively begun exploring their common ground. This is attested, for example, by the 2004 special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics dedicated to corpus linguistics, the 2007 IPrA conference on ‘Pragmatics, corpora and computational linguistics’, the 2008 ICAME conference on ‘Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse’, and a number of recent monographs and edited collections (e.g., Adolphs 2008, Romero-Trillo 2008, Felder et al. 2011, Jucker and Taavitsainen 2014). In this introduction we will discuss how pragmatics and corpus linguistics can profit from each other. The focus will be on the methodologies that are key to the two fields and how they can be integrated into corpus-pragmatic research. To begin with, our use of the term pragmatics needs to be defined (Section 0.2). This will be followed in Section 0.3 by a discussion of the basic characteristics of corpus linguistics. In Section 0.4 we outline how corpus pragmatics can be seen as an intersection of corpus linguistics and pragmatics. In the last section, Section 0.5, we aim to introduce the individual contributions to this handbook in brief detail.

“Will you fuck off please”. The use of please by London teenagers

Abstract The paper investigates how the politeness marker please is used by young people to distinguish themselves from adults and create an identity of their own. The analysis of please is based on the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). The distribution and uses of please in COLT are compared with similar data from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). We can recognize several functions of the “impolite” please in the COLT Corpus. To begin with, it is used strategically to establish or confirm harmonious relationships between the speakers (rapport-strengthening impoliteness). Secondly, “mock impoliteness” may be understood in a positive way because it is amusing or entertaining. In young people’s circles entertainment skills are for example highly valued (entertainment impoliteness). Finally, impoliteness is used creatively in interaction by the participants who use repetition, reformulation and escalation to construct ritualized sequences of apparent insults (creative impoliteness).

Analysing Discourse Markers in Spoken Corpora: Actually as a Case Study

We cannot discuss spoken language without taking into account discourse markers.1 Discourse markers are lexical items such as well, I think, you mean, actually of course, so, in fact. Moder and Martinovic-Zic (2004: 117) describe them as being largely syntax-independent and their use does not change the truth-conditional meaning of a sentence, while Swan (2005: xviii) writes that they show a connection between what is said and the wider context. Below is an example showing the context in which several discourse markers (underlined) have been used: