How to investigate implicit pragmatic phenomena in corpora

Abstract

Corpus pragmatics research mainly employs methods based on explicitly available, automatically searchable forms in corpora. However, there are pragmatic phenomena which do not have explicit forms; therefore, they are difficult to identify in corpora. The present paper aims to examine possibilities of studying implicit pragmatic phenomena in large corpora. Relying on the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus, it provides case studies on implicit arguments, conventional indirect speech acts and implicatures in Hungarian language use. The first case study analyses occurrences of the verb iszik ‘drink’ with implicit direct object arguments in its habitual reading ‘drink alcohol’, the second explores conventionally indirect directives with the verb tud ‘can’, and the third examines implicatures suggested in dispreferred second pair parts. The main conclusion of the paper is that only a corpus-based investigation is possible in studies of implicit pragmatic phenomena, but even this is restricted. Searching for certain explicit patterns in the corpus, combined with a manual, qualitative pragmatic analysis might lead us to identifying implicit pragmatic phenomena. Consequently, corpus methodology and traditional pragmatics research methods can be fruitfully combined.