Review of Development and Application of a Multimodal Corpus for Learners? Pragmatic Competence

Pragmatic competence, a kind of comprehensive language ability, has expanded its scope and approach as the increasingly important status of English as lingua franca in multimodal studies. Based on the situation, this book review gives a comprehensive analysis of Professor Jiang’s monograph Development and Application of a Multimodal Corpus for Learners’ Pragmatic Competence in terms of its content, highlights as well as limitations. There are totally eight chapters included, covering a range of definitions and theoretical foundation of pragmatic competence and corpus construction. The book review highlights three prominent features of the monograph by Professor Jiang, respectively abundant source of data and specific target, a new criterion for evaluating pragmatic competence, and expansion of research approaches for special learner’s pragmatic competence. Additionally, the authors point out some limitations in the book and give suggestions on collecting more relevant data and touching upon more speech acts. On the whole, this informative book lays a solid foundation for novice researchers to look into the field of pragmatics and provides experienced scholars with a feasible perspective.