Suggestions in British and American English: A corpus- linguistic - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

“Suggestions in British and American English: A corpus-linguistic study”

Ilka Flöck University of Oldenburg 33rd DGfS Annual Meeting (Workshop 1 “Beyond Semantics”) February 23-25, Göttingen

Structure of the talk

• Corpora in speech act research

– Form-to-function vs. function-to-form approaches – Prerequisites for automated corpus searches – Problems of precision and recall

• Suggestions in British (BrE) and American English (AmE)

– Defining suggestions – Corpus approach – Results: Head acts and their modification devices

• Annotating corpora pragmatically?

– Representativeness vs. recall – Functional ambiguity and speech act identification

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Corpora in speech act research

• Speech acts are functional units which can be closely

associated with certain surface realisation forms

• Indirect speech acts can often not be associated with specific

realisation form

– Form-to-function approach in corpus linguistics problematic – Speech act research often takes a function-to-form approach

• Automated corpus searches can only be conducted if

realisation forms for a speech act are known

– Lexical markers (e.g. IFIDs, performative verbs) – Syntactic structures (e.g. compliment formulae, cf. Manes & Wolfson 1981)

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Corpora in speech act research

• Even then, problems of precision and recall may occur

(cf. Jucker et al. 2008, Jucker 2009) – Searches may produce functionally diverse hits which need to sorted manually (precision) – Searches may not account for all instances of speech act in the corpus (recall)

• Alternative: bottom-up approach (cf. Kohnen 2008)

– Manual search of a corpus (= “conversation analytical method”, Jucker 2009: 1616) – Many speech acts do not occur highly frequently (manual search of SBCSAE reveals only 317 instances of directive speech acts) – Manual searches are “extremely labour-intensive” (Kohnen 2008: 295) – Problems of representativeness due to the limited size of corpora

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Suggestions in BrE and AmE

• Research questions:

– How are suggestions realised structurally in the two national varieties

• f English?

– Are there any differences in the head act and modification forms used in the two data sets? Do their distributions differ?

• Suggestions are speech acts

– which predict a future (cognitive) act of the hearer. – which can predict a future act of the speaker. – which the speaker believes to be in the interest of the hearer.

• Over 60 realisation forms have been reported on in the

literature

– cf. e.g. Edmondson & House 1981; Koike1994, 1996; Leech & Svartvik 1994; Martínez Flor 2004, Carter & McCarthy 2007; Adolphs 2008

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Suggestions in BrE and AmE: Method

• Corpus approach with subcorpora of

– the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE) – the British component to the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) – Both subcorpora consist of approximately 200,000 tokens.

• Realisation forms reported on in the literature were used as

search items in concordance searches

• Hits were filtered manually for the functional category
• Coding scheme by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) was adapted

– Head act (different levels of directness) – Downgrading/ mitigating modification – Upgrading/ aggravating modification

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Suggestions in BrE and AmE: Results

• Only mild differences in head act forms (n BrE = 117, n AmE = 116)

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56% 36% 6% 3% 61% 38% 1% 0% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% Modal Specific formula Performative Other BrE AmE

Suggestions in BrE and AmE: Results

• Similar strategies, different distribution of modifiers

(n BrE = 190, n AmE = 169)

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15% 37% 34% 6% 8% 21% 40% 30% 2% 7% 0% 15% 30% 45% Syntactic downgraders Lexical/ phrasal downgraders Supportive moves Upgraders Supportive moves Mitigating function Aggravating function BrE AmE

Suggestions in BrE and AmE: Results

• No significant differences in head act strategies
• Differences in the distribution of modification strategies

– Overall number of modifiers higher in the BrE data set – Higher number for aggravating modifiers in the BrE group – Aggravated head acts also contain multiple mitigating modifiers

• Functional ambiguity of realisation forms

– Most head act forms in suggestions can encode other illocutions – Suggestions and requests differ in function

• Suggestions: Action proposed is in the interest of the hearer
• Requests: Action proposed is in the interest of the speaker

– Problem of identification in naturally occurring language samples

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Annotating corpora pragmatically?

• Dilemma in using corpora for speech act research

– Automated searches allow for representativeness but may not trace all instances of a speech act in a corpus – Manual searches may be able to trace all instances but the size of the corpus can never be representative – Corpora annotated for speech acts would partially solve this problem

• Functional ambiguity and speech act identification

– Identification criteria for different directive illocutions remain unclear – Research into identification of (directive) speech acts needed – Insights about speech act identification will help speech act annotation in corpora

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Thank you very much for your attention!

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References

Adolphs, Svenja (2008): Corpus and Context: Investigating Pragmatic Functions in Spoken Discourse. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana; House, Juliane & Kasper, Gabriele (eds.) (1989): Cross- Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Carter, Ronald & McCarthy, Michael (2006): Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide; Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edmondson, Willis & House, Juliane (1981): Let's talk and talk about it. A Pedagogic International Grammar of English. München: Urban & Schwarzenberg. Jucker, Andreas H. (2009): "Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory: The case of compliments". In: Journal of Pragmatics 41 (8), 1611-1635. Jucker, Andreas H.; Schneider, Gerold; Taavitsainen, Irma & Breustedt, Barb (2008): "Fishing for compliments: Precision and recall in corpus-linguistic compliment research". In: Jucker, Andreas H. & Taavitsainen, Irma (eds.): Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins, 273-294.

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References

Kohnen, Thomas (2008): "Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of a corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis". In: Jucker, Andreas & Taavitsainen, Irma (eds.): Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins, 295-310. Koike, Dale A. (1994): "Negation in Spanish and English suggestions and requests: Mitigating effects?". In: Journal of Pragmatics 21 (5), 513-526. Koike, Dale A. (1996): "Transfer of pragmatic competence and suggestions in Spanish foreign language learning". In: Gass, Susan & Neu, Joyce (eds.): Speech Acts Across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 257-281. Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan (2002): A Communicative Grammar of English. 3rd ed. London etc.: Longman. Manes, Joan & Wolfson, Nessa (1981): "The compliment formula". In: Coulmas, Florian (ed.): Conversational Routine. The Hague: Mouton, 115-132.

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References

Martínez Flor, Alicia (2004): The effect of instruction on the development of pragmatic competence in the English as a foreign language context: A study based on

• suggestions. University of Jaume I. Department of English Studies.

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