The good, the bad… and the ugly?

The present article describes the conceptualization of aesthetics in Spanish through the analysis of the two prototypical terms that describe positive and negative sensory appreciation, i.e., “bonito” (beautiful) and “feo” (ugly). Following a mixed-approach methodology combining Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Corpus Pragmatics, the article compares the use of these adjectives in spoken and written language, analyzes their realization in the corpora under analysis, provides the explications that support their polysemy, and describes their distribution in different contexts. The final part of the paper is devoted to the comparison of the use of these adjectives with their counterparts in English, as evidenced by another paper in this special issue.

Speech acts in corpus pragmatics

In corpus pragmatics, most of the research into speech acts still tends to be limited to working with the original, highly abstract, speech-act taxonomies devised by ordinary language philosophers like Austin and Searle. The aim of this article is to illustrate how the use of such restricted taxonomies may lead to oversimplified or potentially misleading impressions regarding the communicative functions expressed in spoken interaction, and to demonstrate how a more elaborate taxonomy, the DART taxonomy (Weisser, 2018), may help us gain better insights into the pragmatic strategies that occur in dialogues. To this end, I will draw on a small sample of dialogues, both from a task-oriented domain and unconstrained interaction, and contrast selected speech-act categorisations on the basis of Searle’s and the DART taxonomy, demonstrating the advantages that arise from using a more fine-grained taxonomy to describe complex verbal exchanges.

Construction of Authorial Identity in Academic Research Articles: From the Perspective of Evidentiality

This paper investigates the construction of authorial identity in academic research articles from the perspective of evidentiality through analyzing 12 academic research articles selected at random from Applied Linguistics, Corpus Pragmatics and Journal of Pragmatics. It is found that the rational employment of evidentials in academic research articles contributes to the construction of authorial identity from the respect of author’s authority and reliability, which is reflected in the choice of evidentials.

Designing and building SCoPE²: A spoken corpus of Brazilian Portuguese and L2-English

This paper presents the process of designing and building a bilingual spoken corpus in order to pragmatically analyse oral L2-English discourse produced by a group of Brazilian university students living in Ireland. It discusses some of the decisions made, challenges faced, and considerations taken while designing a do-it-yourself corpus with a theoretical framework grounded in Corpus Pragmatics. The main objective is to share the lessons learned by examining the steps of designing and building SCoPE², a bilingual spoken corpus, including the selection of participants, gathering data, and challenges in transcribing and coding spoken language with pragmatics in mind.