Contrastive Pragmatics and Corpora

Abstract

Abstract Contrastive pragmatics is closely associated with the use of parallel and comparable corpora for studying the similarities and differences between languages. Parallel corpora have now been extended to more than two languages making them more relevant for typological research, and they can be used to investigate whether there are (discourse) universals across languages. Contrastive pragmatic studies also need to take into account aspects of the communication situation and the social and cultural context. As a result, many contrastive studies nowadays are doubly contrastive in that they compare pragmatic phenomena across both genres and languages. Scholars have also begun to combine contrastive analysis (translations) with the diachronic analysis of pragmatic phenomena in historical corpora, and pragmatic phenomena are studied contrastively with the focus being on sociolinguistic aspects. Illustrating these new uses is a case study which compares English absolutely with Swedish absolut.