In this chapter, the focus turns to practical matters as we outline the various ways in which pragmatics can be researched. To answer a pragmatics-focused research question or to investigate the pragmatics of an issue or practice we need two things. We need a theory of pragmatics, and we need data. We take a closer look at theoretical frameworks and the role they play in shaping a piece of research. We then move on to look at the different sorts of data that might be collected as part of a pragmatics research project. We discuss how intuition plays a role in research and how constructed examples can be used to test predictions and to fine-tune our understanding. We discuss free production tasks and judgement tasks, and we look at some examples of pragmatics research that has used transcripts, texts, or corpora for analysis. Finally, we discuss some of the practicalities of research in pragmatics. We think about how to find a topic to investigate, the ethical considerations that must be part of any project plan, and the issue of diversity and bias in research.

This study reports on a task-based analysis of target discourse by examining a corpus of naturally occurring face-to-face office-hour interactions between English-speaking students and instructors at a US university. Fourteen office hours involving 106 interactants were extracted from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English and coded for types of office hours, sub-tasks, and pragmatic and interactional features. Based on the findings, a prototypical model of an office-hour interaction was produced, which can serve as a sound basis for developing genuine pedagogic tasks for teaching EAP students the necessary second language pragmatics to navigate office-hours.

Corpus pragmatics is an emerging area of research with a growing number of specialist publications. Research in corpus pragmatics draws on empirical language samples captured in language corpora to explore a wide variety of key topics in pragmatics, such as discourse markers, speech acts and (im)politeness. However, the majority of research to date in corpus pragmatics is based on textual (transcribed) renderings of spoken discourse, and there is a notable lack of corpus pragmatic studies that also adopt a multimodal approach, investigating the potential contribution of multiple modes (including speech, gestures and facial expressions) to utterance functions. The current chapter highlights the affordances of using a multimodal corpus pragmatic approach in exploring the role of speech and gesture in meaning making. We illustrate this approach with the example of speech-gesture functional profiles arising from a multimodal analysis of multiword expressions (e.g. ‘do you know/see what I mean’). The chapter provides an overview of key corpus methods that have been used in sociopragmatic research and pragmatic research more generally before presenting our multimodal corpus pragmatic research on ‘do you know/see what I mean’.