A Corpus-Based Classification of Commitments in Business English
This chapter presents a corpus-based study of commitments in Business English emails using a speech act-annotated corpus of emails. Starting from a detailed analysis of the lexicon and phraseology of this speech act, a revised description of commitments i
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Introduction
This chapter presents a corpus-based, data-driven study of the speech act of commitments in Business English (henceforth BE) emails. Based on a sample of 1,200 instances, a detailed analysis of this speech act from a variety of linguistic perspectives is given: lexical, grammatical, and syntactic. We assess how well ‘realworld’ commitments compare to the traditional theoretical definitions given in the literature, whether they are in fact a homogeneous category, and how we ‘do politeness’ when we perform a commitment. By looking at the commitments’ main lexicogrammatical characteristics, including frequent phrases and patterns, we propose a revised description of this speech act, which expands the definitions given by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1976). This work is a case study showing how the tools of corpus pragmatics can lead to new developments not just in the description of language, but also in pragmatic theories. As O’Keeffe et al. (2011) note, “There can be tensions between speech act classifications and taxonomies which were developed on the basis of invented examples, and the analysis of speech acts in corpus data” (O’Keeffe et al. 2011:97). In using corpus analysis to further our understanding of pragmatics, and speech acts in particular, this research aims to resolve and clarify some of these tensions. In particular, the questions posed by this paper are as follows: 1. What do commitments look like? 2. Can we update or expand their definition? 3. What is their range of functions?
R. De Felice (*) Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Romero-Trillo (ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013: New Domains and Methodologies, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_8, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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Related Work
There is a growing body of work on the use of corpora in pragmatics, exemplifying what Romero-Trillo has described as the “mutualistic entente” between the two disciplines of corpus linguistics and pragmatics (Romero-Trillo 2008:3). This involves both the use of corpus-based studies of pragmatics topics, and the use of “pragmatics as a model for the interpretation of [corpus] data” (ib.). Rühlemann (2010) provides an overview of some of the advantages and disadvantages of corpus pragmatics research, as well as discussing some of the key studies in this field; lengthier discussions of the topic are found in Romero-Trillo (2008), Jucker et al. (2009), and O’Keeffe et al. (2011). There are also several monographs exploring particular pragmatic phenomena from a corpus-based perspective, such as Aijmer (1996, 2002) and Brinton (1996) on discourse markers, and Adolphs (2008), which relies on corpus analysis and real data, as in this case, to determine the “functional profiles” of the phrases used in the speech act of suggestions. The research described in the present paper has some similarities with Adolphs (
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