ABSTRACT

CORPUSPRAGMATICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

Cristina Lopes Perna, Ph.D., PUCRS – Brazil

The important influence of pragmatics and corpus linguistics in the area of language teaching is undeniable. Corpus linguistics, a relatively young linguistic discipline (McCarthy and O’Keeffe 2010), appeared in the second half of the twentieth century. The advent of more powerful computers caused a positive effect among applied linguists who, fascinated by the potential for the analysis of language, began to gather large collections of language in an electronic format, and these became known as corpora. The blending of pragmatics with a corpus linguistic methodology covers areas of corpus-pragmatic research including speech acts, deixis, hedges, pragmatic markers and conversational structure, and facilitate a “constant interpretive dialectic between features of texts and the contexts in which they are produced” (Vaughan and Clancy 2013: 70) and are therefore ideally suited to the study of pragmatics.  The most important methodological benefit of corpuspragmatics is the empirical nature of many corpus studies. Although it is acknowledged that corpus studies can also be qualitative, it is the quantitative element provided by corpus linguistics software that defines the discipline.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, pragmatics, language teaching

SHORT BIO

Prof. Cristina Lopes Perna holds a Master’s Degree in Letters (PUCRS, 1990) and a PhD in Letters (PUCRS, 2003). She has earned a Sandwich Ph.D. degree from Indiana State University and a postdoctoral degree from Newcastle University -UK (Senior Internship Capes). She has experience in the area of Linguistics, and English and Portuguese as Additional Languages, working mainly in the following subjects: Acquisition of English and Portuguese Language; Pragmatics; Corpus Linguistics and CA; Cognitive aspects involved in L2 learning and translation. She is a full-professor of the School of Humanities (Letters) and of the Graduate Program in Letters at PUCRS, in which she coordinates the research group on the Use and Processing of Additional Language (UPLA). She is Editor-in-Chief of the Brazilian English Language Teaching Journal (BELT +), which has Qualis A3 and acts as a Public-Sworn Translator in English-Portuguese. She also coordinates the Foreign Language Proficiency Exams at PUCRS besides acting as a Tutor of PET-Letras.