Advancing the Research Agenda of Interlanguage Pragmatics: The Role of Learner Corpora

This chapter provides a critical assessment of the study of pragmatics within Second Language Acquisition research and argues for a broadening of the scope of inquiry in Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP). Traditionally, ILP has been heavily influenced by and largely modeled on cross-cultural pragmatics, adopting its theories, research topics and methodology. This, however, has led to a comparatively narrow research focus and sociopragmatic bias in which the dominant area of investigation has been the speech act. The present chapter argues that pragmatic knowledge in a foreign/second language (L2) clearly includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts and proposes a more encompassing definition of L2 pragmatic knowledge. In doing so, the study highlights the crucial role of learner corpora in the expansion of the narrow research agenda of ILP. Learner corpora – systematic collections of authentic, continuous and contextualized language use (spoken or written) by L2 learners stored in electronic format – can help overcome several problems and limitations posed by the dominance of data elicitation techniques in ILP to date. More recently, spoken learner corpora have been used to study features of what has been called the grammar of conversation. This chapter makes a contribution to this line of research and focuses on the pragmalinguistic component of L2 pragmatic knowledge by examining information organization in discourse and the use of lexico-grammatical means of information highlighting to convey intensification and contrast. It reports on two case studies that investigate emphatic do and demonstrative clefts in the spoken production of French and German learners of English. The results reveal differences between native speakers and learners, but also between the two learner groups that are explained in terms of cross-linguistic influence and language proficiency. The findings also show significant individual differences across the two learner corpora, which has important implications for learner corpus analysis and compilation.