| February 9
|
Tony McEnery (Lancaster University) Speakers, Hearers and Annotation – Why it’s Difficult to do Pragmatics with Corpora |
Abstract
Corpus construction and annotation to date has been shaped by the needs
of a range of end users - grammarians, lexicographers and language engineers
for example. However, the needs of researchers in pragmatics have rarely been
considered. As a consequence, exploiting some existing corpora for 'doing' pragmatics
can be problematic. In this talk I will discuss the forces that have shaped
corpora to date and outline a variety of problems a researcher faces in using
corpora such as the British National Corpus in the study of pragmatics. As part
of this discussion I will present a number of possible solutions to these problems.
Back to the Corpora and Conversation Seminar Series page