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A Corpus-Based Classification of Commitments in Business English

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Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013

Part of the book series: Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics ((YCLP,volume 1))

Abstract

This chapter presents a corpus-based study of commitments in Business English emails using a speech act-annotated corpus of emails. Starting from a detailed analysis of the lexicon and phraseology of this speech act, a revised description of commitments is proposed. This considers three distinct sub-categories with different functions, namely action, informational, and interactional. By bringing together authentic corpus data and computational analysis, this research demonstrates how corpus linguistics can contribute to our understanding of the pragmatics of workplace communication.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although the research deals with written language, for convenience and uniformity with spoken language research, I refer to speaker and hearer instead of writer and reader, respectively.

  2. 2.

    The Enron email corpus consists of the unedited, unmodified collection of Enron employees’ mailboxes; this data was made publicly available following legal proceedings against the corporation. It is the largest publicly available collection of real-world BE email data.

  3. 3.

    I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who drew my attention to the pragmatically annotated spoken language corpus by Kallen and Kirk (2012); unfortunately I have not yet been able to review it so I cannot assess its suitability for the present research.

  4. 4.

    There is also limited overlap between the research presented here and the well-established field of dialogue act classification (for example Core and Allen 1997; Georgila et al. 2009; Stolcke et al. 2000). The focus there is on synchronous communication, with few complete sentences, and categories which do not reflect well the types of utterances found in written language.

  5. 5.

    For a related discussion, cf. Koester (2004a:62), where the author notes how the use of modals such as will and be going to indicate confidence and assertiveness on the part of the speaker, in contrast to the more tentative modals could or might.

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Acknowledgments 

Rachele De Felice would like to gratefully acknowledge the support received by the Leverhulme Trust; this research was undertaken by the Fellowship holder and not on behalf of the Leverhulme Trust. This research was carried out while the author was a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham. Thank you also to Jeannique Darby, Tony Fisher, and David Peplow for their invaluable work in manually annotating the Enron email data and identifying taxonomical issues, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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  1. Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT, London, UK

    Rachele De Felice

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  1. Rachele De Felice
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Correspondence to Rachele De Felice .

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  1. , Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Autonomous University of Madrid, C/Francisco Tomás y Valiente 1, Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Jesús Romero-Trillo

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De Felice, R. (2013). A Corpus-Based Classification of Commitments in Business English. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_8

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