24. Corpus-based metapragmatics

Abstract

Metapragmatics encompasses the study of displays of awareness on the part of users and observers of language about their use of language. In this chapter, it is argued that corpus-based approaches to metapragmatics are uniquely positioned to advance such studies, as it allows for interpretive (horizontal) and statistical (vertical) methods of analysis to be successively applied to the analysis of metapragmatic data. The different ways in which corpora have been used to study metapragmatic labels with respect to the broader metacommunicative lexicon of which they form a part are discussed, alongside studies of metapragmatics in use, that is, the use of these metapragmatic labels in situated contexts. It is then argued, building on a case study illustrating how claims of non-serious intent (e.  g. just kidding, only joking) can be studied from a corpus-based perspective, that studies in corpus-based metapragmatics necessarily involve carefully interweaving horizontal and vertical methods of analysis. The chapter concludes with a call for further corpus-based metapragmatic studies across different languages.