On Creating an Empirical Database of Pragmatic Phenomena

Grammar and vocabulary of a language are its first aspects to be taught when teaching it. Even if a person mastering her/his own language or studying a foreign one does not have a goal of becoming a professional linguist, s/he will have to gain a good idea about what phonetics, grammar and semantics of the language s/he is learning is at some stage during this process. Most probably though the term “pragmatics” will remain unknown to her/him. It can be said that there is no tradition of teaching pragmatics; rather some individual as­pects of the language that belong to this language level can become the focus of study when mastering native and foreign languages. On the other hand, only through understanding pragmatic aspects of communication the skills of using the knowledge of phonetics, lexis, grammar and semantics can be developed. The goal of this article is to draw the readers’ attention to the ways of overcoming this situation. To this end, the goal of creating an em­pirical database of pragmatic phenomena becomes one of the most urgent to be dealt with. A direction in the development of corpus pragmatics focusing on pragmatic presupposi­tions is suggested.

Keywords: pragmatics, presupposition, ambiguity, mastering the language, pragmatic corpus, corpus of rare linguistic phenomena.

On Creating an Empirical Database of Pragmatic Phenomena