A Corpus Pragmatics Approach to Active Listenership in Conversations in British English: Contextualised Function-To-Form

Active Listenership are the features that refer to the linguistic behaviour of the listener in casual conversations. The listener continuously utters Listener Response Tokens, Sentence-Completions and Which-Comment-Clauses to signal emotional and social involvement in the discourse. Particularly in the field of corpus pragmatics, Active Listenership has found attention over the past two decades. In this paper, I introduce a novel context-driven function-to-form corpus pragmatics annotation scheme. The scheme is applied to a down-sampled version of the spoken BNC2014, and subsequently evaluated in terms of inter-rater plausibility. Then, I present the qualitative findings on how frequent the features of Active Listenership are in the corpus in general. Subsequently, I analyse the contextual units (as per my annotation scheme) to show which feature of Active Listenership is most likely to occur in a specific speech context. I finish this paper with suggestions for future research and a call to include more features of conversational English into an elaboration of the annotation scheme. My findings can be applied to general pragmatics research and English Language Teaching.