“Suggestions in British and American English: A corpus- linguistic study” Ilka Flöck University of Oldenburg 33 rd 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 February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 2
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) February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 3
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 February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 4
Suggestions in BrE and AmE • Research questions: – How are suggestions realised structurally in the two national varieties of 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 February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 5
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 February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 6
Suggestions in BrE and AmE: Results • Only mild differences in head act forms (n BrE = 117, n AmE = 116) BrE AmE 80% 61% 56% 60% 38% 36% 40% 20% 6% 3% 1% 0% 0% Modal Specific formula Performative Other February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 7
Suggestions in BrE and AmE: Results • Similar strategies, different distribution of modifiers (n BrE = 190, n AmE = 169) BrE AmE 45% 40% 37% 34% 30% 30% 21% 15% 15% 8% 6% 7% 2% 0% Syntactic Lexical/ phrasal Supportive Upgraders Supportive downgraders downgraders moves moves Mitigating function Aggravating function February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 8
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 February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 9
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 February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 10
Thank you very much for your attention! February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 11
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. February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 12
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. February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 13
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. February 23, 2011 DGfS Annual Meeting 2011, Göttingen 14
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