Activity: Talk or presentation › Science to science
Description
This talk reports on an ongoing programme of work which applies corpus methods to the study of (im)politeness, an area of study within pragmatics. It begins by discussing some of the theoretical issues encountered when studying pragmatic phenomena via corpus methods, not least because of the latter’s reliance on linguistic form. It then proposes a new method for studying (im)politeness in large and diverse corpora: identifying specific formulae, examining their function in context via concordance analysis; and then using statistical methods to trace variation across groups and contexts. Drawing upon a series of case studies, the talk examines how (im)politeness varies across both Britain and the USA.