Pragmatic annotation: A stepping stone to analyzing intercultural communication through ELF

Description

Corpora and linguistic annotation have been instrumental in studying the intercultural pragmatics of English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication. The compilation of ELF corpora, particularly the Vienna-Oxford international corpus of English (VOICE) (VOICE 2021)—the first general ELF corpus—has enabled empirical descriptions of ELF interactions in the first place. Even more so, the annotation available in the corpus texts from VOICE has been a valuable asset in studying the pragmatic practices and communicative processes occurring in these interactions (see Breiteneder et al. 2006; Osimk-Teasdale & Dorn 2016). This annotation has been specifically designed to highlight the characteristics of ELF communication and, like any form of annotation, it has enabled category-based retrieval, which goes beyond simple form-based corpus searches.

This talk will focus on pragmatic annotation as one specific type of corpus annotation. Although pragmatic annotation is sometimes viewed with skepticism due to its interpretative nature compared to other types of annotation, it has been recognized as highly useful for corpus-based pragmatic analyses (cf. O’Keeffe 2018: 599) and, as such, also holds significant potential for expanding methodologies in ELF research. In my talk, I will introduce a system designed for annotating pragmatic functions in corpus texts from VOICE and discuss the considerations and necessary steps involved in the development of such a scheme. Finally, I will explore some research possibilities enabled by this type of annotation, with a particular focus on how it could be used in combination with the search functionalities available in VOICE 3.0 Online.

Period	11 Nov 2025
Held at	Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Anglistik, Austria
Degree of Recognition	Local