It is historically the case that linguists interested in pragmatic phenomena -- whether in terms of speech act theory, relevance theory, argumentation, enunciation, etc. -- have not always made use of corpora or, when they have done so, have used them in a spirit of "illustrative eclecticism" (Kohnen 2015:56 [1]), drawing on genuine examples to illustrate a theoretical perspective. In recent years various semasiological approaches have considered how the apparent polysemies of a given marker can be fruitfully explained in terms of complex configurations, as the postulated semantic potentials of cooccurring items interact to generate contextually situated values. Such an approach opens new perspectives for quantitative exploitation of corpus material in theories which have traditionally stressed qualitative analysis of a limited number of cases. The technology of corpus enquiry now enables us to conduct sophisticated searches in terms of collocational affinities, bearing on data which can -- according to how the corpus is tagged and marked up -- involve linguistic and paralinguistic features both (pauses, overlaps, speakers' identities, textual genres etc.).
The aim of the present conference is therefore to investigate the usefulness and relevance of the quantitative analysis of corpus data of English and Englishes, in those areas of linguistic research where a more qualitative, fine-grained approach has traditionally prevailed. Issues addressed might include:
* semantico-pragmatic profiling of specific markers or configurations of markers via quantitative corpus-based data;
* preprocessing requirements on corpora with a view to such research, i.e. specific or ad hoc tagging or mark up conventions;
* types of corpus enquiry, tools, syntax and/or algorithms relevant to such research.
In keeping with the programme of our local research group Identité Culturelle, Textes et Théâtralité, studies that address issues of corpus approaches to linguistic identities are also encouraged.
Conference languages: English and French.
[1] Kohnen, Thomas. 2014. "Speech Acts: a diachronic perspective", in Corpus Pragmatics. A Handbook. Aijmer, K. and Rühlemann, C. (eds.), Cambridge University Press.
