卷 29, 编号 4 (2025): Pragmalinguistics: Сorpora and Discourse Studies

Pragmalinguistics is a dynamic field of study that combines insights from pragmatics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics to examine how speakers use language to achieve communicative goals and construct meaning in various social and cultural contexts. This field has seen significant growth over the past few decades, due to methodological innovations and a growing interest in analyzing real-world language data. The relevance of this issue is due to the increasing interest in using corpora and discourse analysis to study “language in use” and “language in action”. The volume aims to discuss the current state of pragmalinguistic research and its connections with other linguistic methods, contributing to the innovative and promising field of corpus pragmatics. This issue presents a range of theoretical and empirical studies that use corpus-based methods to investigate language as a means of communication, social interaction, and intercultural understanding. It emphasizes the significance of corpora in exploring various aspects of pragmatics, including discourse, intercultural, social, cognitive-inferential, and historical perspectives. It also highlights the potential of an interdisciplinary approach to enhance corpus pragmatics by providing fresh insights into the structure, function, and variation of pragmatic units across languages and discourses and discusses the prospects for future research in the field.

Pragmatics is typically understood as the study of relationship between the subject and the sign system. Therefore, identifying the subject is a crucial issue that influences the development of this field. However, it is still common to limit the concept of the subject in pragmatics to observable entities, primarily the speaker. The limitations of this approach become particularly evident in the study of suprapersonal communication, where institutions or imaginary communities serve as communicators . This paper aims to identify the pragmatic characteristics of interlocutors in suprapersonal communication. Сonsider the formation of pragmatics, and the further distinction between macro- and micropragmatics as well between branches of pragmatics such as intercultural, cross-cultural, and socio-cultural pragmatics. As a result of the analysis of these concepts, supported by the consideration of specific cases of non-personalized communication, I conclude that it is necessary to change the approach to the subject by introducing the concept of “imaginary communicant”. This can be seen as a development of Charles Pierce’s approach to semantics as a result of the interaction of a quasi-speaker and a quasi-interpreter welded within the sign . Additionally, I suggest a new distinction between macro- and megapragmatics. The term macropragmatics can be applied to situations where communication agents are identifiable with specific institutional entities acting as “speaking persons”. This makes it possible to transcend back to real individuals. This concept should be distinguished from “megapragmatics,” which pertains to global imagined entities endowed with semiotic selves, such as nations, cultures, or societies. The study contributes to a better understanding of how the concept of the interlocutor applies to suprapersonal levels of intercultural and sociocultural communication and what semiotic characteristics it can be endowed with on the macropragmatic level.

Political persuasion in institutional contexts often relies on subtle linguistic cues rather than overt argumentation. While Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has extensively examined macro-level ideological strategies, the micro-pragmatic mechanisms through which everyday expressions shape political meaning remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by analysing how pragmatic markers contribute to the implicit manipulation and ideological positioning of speakers in European parliamentary discourse. The aim of the paper is to provide tools for the analysis of manipulation and to show how micro-level pragmatic markers can reveal implicit persuasive strategies such as presupposing agreement or invoking shared knowledge. Drawing on the EUROPARL corpus of European Parliament debates, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Furkó’s (2019, 2020) critical-pragmatic approach, it analyzes markers such as of course, well, but, and you know. The study shows that while traditionally linked to cohesion and interaction management, these markers also play pivotal roles in populist and strategic discursive practices. The interplay of evidential markers, modal adverbs, and general extenders reveals how they jointly background information, reinforce polarization, and recontextualize arguments. Their frequency, distribution, and co-occurrence patterns reflect broader socio-political trends and manipulative strategies of legitimation. Far from being ancillary, pragmatic markers are integral to authority enactment, ideological contestation, suppression of alternative viewpoints, and consensus-building. In addition to corpus methods, the study explores AI-assisted tools for identifying and categorizing pragmatic phenomena in large political corpora, highlighting both their potential and limitations. By integrating pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and CDA, it advances an interdisciplinary approach to language, power, and politics in parliamentary settings.

The paper offers an overview of the frequency and functions of three basic interjections in Greek, the phonologically minimal α /a/ ‘ah, huh’, ε /e/ ‘eh’ and ω or ο /o/ ‘oh’, with the aim of identifying the full range of their uses that have not been dealt with in the literature, which mainly treats them as elements denoting emotions. The data comes from a variety of Modern Greek corpora, including the conversational and the literary sub-corpora of the Corpus of Greek Texts (CGT, 1990–2010), the Corpus of Greek Film Dialogue and, for reasons of diachronic comparison, the Diachronic Corpus of Greek of the 20th Century (CGT20, 1900–1989). The findings suggest that, although a and e are both found among the 50 most frequent items, e is three times more frequent that a, while o is almost non-existent in conversation, in contrast to literary data, especially from an earlier period. In addition, a, e and o have developed a range of functions beyond mere exclamation, which include indexing surprise or sudden realization, use in address or as attention signals, evaluation, intensification, the drawing of implicatures, as well as their use as filled pauses or invariant tags. On the basis of these extensive pragmatic uses, it is suggested that interjections like a, e and o function as pragmatic particles having a prominent role in both conversation and its literary and filmic representation. More generally, it seems that the category of “interjection” covers a wide range of actual uses that are more akin to pragmatic particles (Beeching 2002), inserts (Biber et al. 1999) or interactives (Heine 2023), that is elements with a rich contribution to interactive discourse, both in non-scripted and scripted conversation. Corpora can be instrumental in evaluating this pragmatic import and its diachronic development.

This study examines the Spanish discourse marker (DM) bueno through a constructional-pragmatic approach that challenges traditional lexicocentric analyzes. Its aim is to prove that analyzing the pragmatic-discursive values of this DM as emerging from its participation in certain discourse patterns (DPs) enhances previous descriptions. Building on recent theoretical developments from Hispanic linguistics as well as from research on other languages that warn against lexicocentric semasiological approaches, the study adopts an onomasiological and constructional perspective that advocates for integrated characterizations that capture DMs’ functioning within larger DPs. Through analysis of the Val.Es.Co. corpus of colloquial Spanish conversation (Briz & Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2002), we identify and formalize metadiscursive DPs involving bueno . These include prototypical metadiscursive functions such as topic resumption, topic shift, reformulation, and online planning support, as well as turn-taking and other functions characteristic of turn-initial position in both initiating and, especially, reactive turns, all of which are understood as metadiscursive. Our findings demonstrate that the diverse functional values traditionally attributed exclusively to bueno actually derive from the complete pragmatic-discursive patterns in which this DM participates. Formalized DPs offer practical applications for monolingual and crosslinguistic description, historical reconstruction of grammaticalization pathways, and applied domains such as L2 teaching and machine translation. Theoretically, our results show that the DPs approach resolves persistent contradictions in the literature, where researchers infer DMs’ values from co-text while simultaneously abstracting from that same co-text in their descriptions. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing debates about constructions beyond sentential level by bridging Construction Grammar frameworks with discourse analysis.

The BRICS grouping functions as a civilizational project that realizes unique strategies of identification, self-identification, and image formation on the geopolitical arena. The topicality of the BRICS’ image study is determined by its growing role in the international setup. The present study seeks to examine the BRICS’ metaphorical modelling in the mass-media discourse of one of its member states, the Republic of South Africa. The research data were collected from the News on the Web Corpus. The illustrative corpus was compiled based on thematic, chronological, and frequency principles with the help of computer-aided and manual processing. A total of 521 metaphors were selected from 1000 texts. The methodological foundation of the study is the theory of image schemas, as proposed by M. Johnson and G. Lakoff. The metaphors were studied through quantitative and qualitative methods: quantitative estimation, metaphorical modelling, cognitive, discursive, linguistic and cultural analysis. The findings of this study suggest that despite a relatively low metaphor density in South African media discourse, the BRICS image is structured by more than 10 source domains. The frequency of similar image schemas (e.g., SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, CONTAINER, CENTRE-PERIPHERY, FORCE, LINK, etc.) underlying the metaphors is linked to their capacity to reflect the fundamental characteristics of the grouping: multipolarity, national sovereignty, equality, and mutual beneficial cooperation. Family, game and sport, body, and animal metaphors, based on social and biological archetypes, were found more culturally marked than those relying on universal physical laws (path, mechanism, architecture, war, celestial body). The research contributes to the development of medialinguistics, which provides a solid theoretical and analytical framework for studying international relations and phenomena from a linguistic perspective.