Studies in Corpus Linguistics – serie

The present volume is intended as a reference book on Wikipedia corpus studies, from corpus construction to exploration and analysis. Wikipedia is a complex object, difficult to manipulate for linguists and corpus researchers. In addition to the encyclopedic articles consulted by millions of users, it contains vast spaces of written discussions, aka talk pages, where Wikipedia authors negotiate the collaborative editing of articles, make evaluations, or discuss related topics. The proposed volume covers Wikipedia articles, their revision histories, and discussions, with a focus on discussions, which have not been studied extensively so far and have also been neglected in previous corpus building efforts. Wikipedia discussions are instances of computer-mediated communication (CMC), thus constituting a completely different, interaction-oriented linguistic genre. Sophisticated tools and methods of linguistic annotation and corpus exploration are needed to exploit the huge and valuable corpus resources that can be constructed from the Wikipedia discussions. The present volume aims at encouraging and facilitating Wikipedia corpus studies, providing standards, recommendations, and innovative methods to build and explore Wikipedia corpora, and presenting corpus studies that make the most of the peculiarities of Wikipedia.

This book brings together corpus linguistics and pragmatics by extending the emerging corpus analytic framework of local grammar to speech act research, aiming to enrich the toolkit of corpus-based speech act studies. It outlines four directions in which local grammar can be useful for investigating speech acts, namely, a local grammar approach to annotating speech acts, developing local grammars of speech acts, identifying speech act constructions via the lens of local grammars, and applying local grammars into contrastive speech act studies. These directions are illustrated with studies on apology in contemporary spoken British English, which shows that local grammar can be an innovative approach to advance speech act studies and that such research has significant implications and applications. The book should be of interest to researchers and students in corpus linguistics, pragmatics, construction grammar, and L2 speech act research and teaching.