Corpus pragmatics has evolved as a burgeoning field in linguistics, integrating the qualitative methodology typical of pragmatics with the quantitative methodology of corpus linguistics, despite the very different trajectories that pragmatics and corpus linguistics have developed since their inceptions.

As the first handbook on corpus pragmatics as a field, this volume brings together a team of leading scholars from around the world, who examine the ways in which the use of corpus data has informed research into different key aspects of pragmatics, including speech acts, pragmatic principles, pragmatic markers, evaluation, reference, and conversational organization. Taken together, they reveal the synergy between empirical and theoretical approaches to pragmatics.

The book is a substantial volume, with sixteen chapters and an introduction by the editors. In ‘Corpus pragmatics: Laying the foundations’, Christopher Ruhlemann & Karin Aijmer discuss how pragmatics and corpus linguistics can profit each other, and discuss how the methodologies which are key to the two fields can be integrated into corpus pragmatic research. They first define pragmatics and corpus linguistics respectively, highlight the features of corpus pragmatics, and make clear the two-fold aim of this volume: to both overview and expand the field of corpus pragmatics. They then characterize briefly each of the sixteen contributions.

Corpus-based studies of speech acts have traditionally focused on fixed or conventionalized speech acts. Part I, ‘Corpora and speech acts’, attempts to explain why identification and analysis of speech acts using corpus-linguistic methods raises a number of problems for both diachronic and synchronic study of this pragmatic phenomenon.

The first part begins with ‘Speech acts: A synchronic perspective’. In this chapter, Paula Garcia McAllister explores the corpus-based investigations into speech acts. She describes several major corpus-based speech act studies, including her own work on directives in academic contexts. The findings show that situation types play a role in predicting the type of speech acts used. Some speech acts that have been neglected in previous research are identified, such as warnings, instructions or directions. The author concludes with four challenges that corpus pragmatics researches should face as this field of inquiry grows: (i) to consider other linguistic cues to identify speech acts; (ii) to explore more efficient methods to annotate speech act utterances; (iii) to develop robust empirically-based definitions of speech acts; and (iv) to establish multimodal corpora to disambiguate pragmatic meaning (47).

The second chapter, ‘Speech acts: A diachronic perspective’, is authored by Thomas Kohnen. In a move away from synchronic investigation, he outlines the research on speech acts in the history of English, which he divides into three approaches: illustrative eclecticism, structural eclecticism, and modern methods (approximation and manual analysis of whole corpora). A pilot study on English performatives from the 15th to 19th centuries is reported. He then points out the methodological problems of a diachronic study of speech acts and directs three areas for future research: research should enhance corpus-based methodology, fill the many gaps in the research, and reveal the high-level factors that shape different ways people ‘do things with words’.

The last chapter in Part I is devoted to ‘Speech act annotation’. Martin Weisser describes pragmatic annotation as a complex and interpretive process. He provides a comparison of three main annotation schemes (DAMSL, SWDB, DART) and their relative merits, includes a brief case study illustrating the usefulness of pragmatic annotation, and offers advice on how to improve the identification and subsequent pragmatic annotation of pragmatic-related phenomena.

Pragmatics involves principles and maxims for the interpretation of utterances and lexical elements. The three chapters in Part II, ‘Corpora and pragmatic principles’, address three heavily debated issues.

Chapter 4, ‘Processability’, explores whether the pragmatic principle of processability, as manifested in the conventions of information packaging, can have an impact on the development of syntactic structure, and to what extent corpus data can help answer this question. By investigating a particular type of matrix clause, e.g. I think [(that) a student failed the exam], which acts as a starting point for a new proposition in the form of a subsequent  that-clause (bracketed in the example above), Gunther Kaltenbock asserts the usefulness of corpora for identifying textual uses of presentational matrix clauses but calls for the availability of spoken language data from various time periods.

The purpose of Chapter 5, ‘Relevance’, is to show that observation made from corpora can shed significant light on how constraints on relevance are practised by real speakers in real discourse contexts. The study focuses on discourse markers and interjections. Gisle Anderson argues that there is a need to focus more systematically on emerging discourse markers and their contributions to relevance. Besides, the author advocates a cross-linguistic treatment of discourse markers, i.e. how discourse markers are borrowed from a source language into a recipient language. The discussion of two specific discourse markers, as if and duh, suggests that pragmatic borrowing can be explored using corpus-based methods in combination with the relevance-theoretic analytic apparatus.

Chapter 6 is entitled ‘Politeness’. It aims to investigate how politeness is realized in different cultural contexts through a corpus-based analysis of mitigated criticism in English and Italian academic book review articles in the field of history. Using corpora to identify lexical instances of mitigated criticism and analyze their pragmatic functions, Giuliana Diani demonstrates that English and Italian reviewers deploy a considerable range of linguistic devices when expressing mitigated criticism of peers. She asserts that an understanding of evaluative speech acts is also required for pedagogical purposes.

Part III, ‘Corpora and pragmatic markers’, presents the state of the art in the studies of various markers, both prototypical and non-prototypical.

In Chapter 7, ‘Pragmatic markers’, Karin Aijmer uses the British component of the International Corpus of English and analyzes I think in both the spoken and written components across different text types. She argues that this small case study can serve as a testing ground for the hypothesis that pragmatic markers have a flexible meaning or meaning potential rather than a fixed meaning; what requires further exploration is the association between grammaticalization and contextual features such as the type of activity and the identity of the speaker.

Chapter 8 focuses on ‘Stance markers’. Bethany Gray & Douglas Biber identify and describe new stance structures typical of academic writing through corpus-based research on adjectives and nouns that act as overt lexical-grammatical markers of stance. For example, they investigate stance adjectives and stance nouns controlling that-complement clauses and to-complement clauses, and stance nouns followed by of-phrases. They argue that the proposed features are not captured by current corpus-based methods but the full range of features used across registers await further exploration.

Chapter 9 is Neil Norrick’s contribution on ‘Interjections’. He argues that corpus research is necessary to reveal the distribution and range of functions of interjection. Characteristic constructions and functions in four specific areas – exclamatory constructions, constructed dialogue, phrasal interjections, and combinations of interjections – are featured in this chapter in order to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of current corpus research. Interjections present special problems for corpus research: they are not consistently marked or characterized in corpora and they suffer inconsistent tagging. Hence, large corpora and careful qualitative analysis continue to be necessary to determine particular functions.

Evaluation is pervasive in virtually all forms of linguistic communication. Part IV, ‘Corpora and evaluation’, surveys and presents empirical study into this key pragmatic area.

In Chapter 10, ‘Evaluative prosody’, Alan Partington uses a 150-million-word corpus of UK broadsheet newspaper texts to explain why we might explore evaluative prosody to examine the notion of evaluation as realized in communicative discourse. Based on corpus-assisted observational research, he argues that evaluative prosody has aroused interest in the field of lexical grammar because this approach provides the strongest account of why this phenomenon occurs: to fulfill a speaker’s need to express a consistent attitude to whatever is being conveyed.

Chapter 11, ‘Tails’, investigates a specific non-canonical feature: tails – or right dislocation. Ivor Timmis attempts to provide a general syntactic and pragmatic analysis of tails. This study analyzes the form of the structure and its four variants: full noun phrase tails, pronoun tails, operator tails, and inverted operator tails. Evidence from three different corpora shows that tails serve both to reflect and reinforce the identities of the communities.

Part V, ‘Corpora and reference’, presents recent research aimed at remedying the neglect of this understudied core notion of pragmatics.

Few corpus studies have focused explicitly on deictics to a significant degree. Chapter 12, ‘Deixis’, takes up the challenge and reports on a case study of ‘introductory this’, a usage specific to conversational narratives. The study conducted on the Narrative Corpus by Christopher Ruhlemann & Matthew O’Donnell contributes to this body of evidence, suggesting that the choice of this is determined by a variety of factors including not only proximity but also information status vis-à-vis the referent, the relationship between the speaker and hearer and the theme. The study also confirms the usefulness of corpora in offering multiple layers of sophisticated annotation.

Vagueness is a common and well-cited feature of spoken language in particular. In Chapter 13, ‘Vagueness’, Winnie Cheng & Anne O’Keeffe use both intracultural and intercultural corpora to analyze one aspect of vague language use, namely vague approximators (e.g. about), where they are used to modify numbers or quantifiers in the context of reference. The authors compare the use of vague language by native and non-native speakers of Hong Kong English with their use in Irish English. They also classify nouns and noun phrases in the corpora into semantic categories to allow a closer look at the use of vague approximators in successful reference across these two different spoken corpora.

Chapter 14, ‘Turn management and the fillers uh and um’, discusses the role of vocalizations in turn-taking in English. Gunnel Tottie argues that turn-taking should be seen as a collaborative effort rather than a competitive ‘fight for the floor’. The findings about taking, holding and yielding turns are equally applicable to many types of spoken interactions such as questions, requests, debates, and discussions. What needs to be taken into account is the deeper level of speaker action and intentionality. Finding out more about the correlation between turn design and action type is identified as a challenge for corpus pragmatics.

Chapter 15, ‘Turn management and backchannels’, reports the corpus research on backchanneling, focusing on how backchannels uttered by the listener may contribute to turn management, i.e. to both turn maintenance and the negotiation of a change of turns. Using multilayer analysis tools, Pam Peters & Deanna Wong study a set of telephone dialogues in which backchannels are the only form of listener feedback, thus maximally meaningful as feedback to the speaker/turn-holder in the conversation. The findings reveal that backchanneling plays a larger part in turn management than has hitherto been recognized in research on the organization of social dialogue.

The discussion in Chapter 16, ‘Co-constructed turn-taking’, is grounded in the view that discourse is contingent upon sense-making and conversational units are profoundly pragmatic. Brian Clancy & Michael McCarthy center their investigation into the potential for completion and extension of a first utterance by a second speaker utilizing the resources of the turn-taking system and the syntactic system to create a single discourse unit. The patterns of co-constructed utterances involve three high-frequency items: if, when, and which. Corpus investigation helps tease out the regularities in the co-construction of utterances and reveals considerable variations of canonical patterns.

In their entirety, the sixteen chapters demonstrate how corpus pragmatics, a relatively new approach to studying the ways natural language is used, helps elucidate otherwise inaccessible form–function mappings. This handbook is a timely and welcome addition to the body of empirically-oriented study of pragmatics, particularly as it offers practical solutions on how to address the problems related to corpus research into utterance function, particularly the assembling and accessing of spoken corpora.

This book represents an invaluable resource for an interested readership. The individual studies introduce and illustrate important new paradigms in research and scholarship. Many complex constructs are clearly presented and amply illustrated. An awareness of the limitations of empirical study is highlighted throughout. Given its breadth, it is likely to constitute an important resource for scholars and students alike.