Abstract
Abstract
Pragmatics uses a broad range of research methods. While its origins can be found in the introspectional methods of language philosophers, more recent approaches tend to favor empirical research methods based on experimentation and observation. Introspectional methods are based on philosophical and cognitive considerations of intuited language samples. Experimental methods make use of a range of different elicitation techniques involving both production and perception tasks in which specific factors influencing the use of language can be carefully isolated. Observational methods, finally, are based on natural language data that has been produced in communicative situations without any researcher intervention. They include both small‐scale data sets in which the details of communicative interaction can be investigated manually and large‐scale corpora of language data in which units of pragmatic interest are retrieved with corpus‐linguistic tools. The choice of method always depends on the specific research questions to be investigated and the available data, and it must take into consideration the respective strength and weaknesses of each method.