ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on how researchers have investigated speech acts and pragmatic markers in corpora, and then turn to corpus-based studies of prosody and non-verbal behavior that have implications for second language (L2) pragmatics research. It discusses research on formulaic sequences that can be used to understand pragmatics aspects of language use within discourse. The chapter discusses key areas in which corpus linguistic researchers can focus in order to advance research in L2 pragmatics. Although corpus linguistics has become a central methodology for second language acquisition research, relatively less work has focused on the area of L2 pragmatics. The chapter deals 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 the research. Progress has been somewhat slow given that not many corpus resources have been created for pragmatics research.