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

Ilka FlöckUniversity of Oldenburg33rd 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– 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. ‘Traceability’– Functional ambiguity and speech act identification

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Corpora in speech act research• Speech acts are functional units which might be (closely)

associated with certain surface realisation forms• Indirect realisations pose a problem for corpus searches

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

• Automated corpus searches can only be conducted ifrealisation 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 (problem of precision)– Searches may not account for all instances of speech act in the corpus

(problem of recall)

• Alternative: bottom-up approach (cf. Kohnen 2008)– Manual search (= “conversation analytical method”, Jucker 2009: 1616)– Many speech acts do not occur highly frequently in conversations– Manual searches are “extremely labour-intensive” (Kohnen 2008: 295)– Problems of representativeness due to the limited size of the corpus

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Suggestions in BrE and AmE• Research questions:

– How are suggestions realised structurally in the two national varietiesof English?

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

• Suggestions are speech acts– which predict a future (cognitive) act of the hearer.– which have both a directive and a commissive force.– which the speaker believes to be in the interest of the hearer.

• Over 60 realisation forms 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)– Size: approximately 200,000 tokens (casual conversation)

• Realisation forms reported on in the literature were used assearch items in concordance searches

• Hits were filtered manually for the functional category

• Coding scheme by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) was adopted– 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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Suggestions in BrE and AmE: Results• Similar strategies, different distribution of modifiers

(n BrE = 190, n AmE = 169)

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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?• 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 make speech act

annotation in corpora more reliable

• 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 could at least partially solve this

problem

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Thank you very much for your attention!

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ReferencesAdolphs, 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 PedagogicInternational Grammar of English. München: Urban & Schwarzenberg.

Jucker, Andreas H. (2009): "Speech act research between armchair, field andlaboratory: 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 complimentresearch". In: Jucker, Andreas H. & Taavitsainen, Irma (eds.): Speech Acts in theHistory of English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins, 273-294.

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ReferencesKohnen, 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 Spanishforeign language learning". In: Gass, Susan & Neu, Joyce (eds.): Speech ActsAcross Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language. Berlin/ NewYork: 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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ReferencesMartínez Flor, Alicia (2004): The effect of instruction on the development of pragmatic

competence in the English as a foreign language context: A study based onsuggestions. University of Jaume I. Department of English Studies.

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