Corpus Linguistics: Some (Meta-)Pragmatic Reflections

Corpus linguistics has gained a renewed ascendance recently, thanks in part to the availability of better, computerized methods of dealing with large bodies of text. Thus, the older term ‘quantitative linguistics’ was effectively replaced by its successor, ‘corpus linguistics’, embracing not only the well-known and trusted statistical methods of handling linguistic date, but also newer approaches, such as indexing in context, creation of (syntactically and semantically) annotated texts, automated text analysis, and so on. The pragmatic aspect of these endeavors is to be sought in their relationship to the user, as this is what a pragmatic approach is all about. After a brief introduction to the term ‘corpus’ and its uses, it is shown that corpus-related approaches have a lot to offer a pragmaticist studying the influence that texts and users exert on each other through and in the new medium of computerized treatment. In addition, special pragmatic and meta-pragmatic implications with regard to language acquisition and other areas of applied linguistics are taken into consideration. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.