Suggestions in British and American English: A

corpus-linguistic study

Ilka Flck
University of Oldenburg
33rd DGfS Annual Meeting (Workshop 1 Beyond Semantics)
February 23-25, Gttingen
 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 if
realisation 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 varieties
of English?
Are there any differences in the head act and modification strategies
used 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; Martnez 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 as

search 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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 References
Adolphs, 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 Pedagogic
International Grammar of English. Mnchen: Urban & Schwarzenberg.
Jucker, Andreas H. (2009): "Speech act research between armchair, field and
laboratory: 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 compliment
research". In: Jucker, Andreas H. & Taavitsainen, Irma (eds.): Speech Acts in the
History of English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins, 273-294.

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 References
Kohnen, 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 Spanish
foreign language learning". In: Gass, Susan & Neu, Joyce (eds.): Speech Acts
Across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language. Berlin/ New
York: 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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 References
Martnez Flor, Alicia (2004): The effect of instruction on the development of pragmatic
competence in the English as a foreign language context: A study based on
suggestions. University of Jaume I. Department of English Studies.

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