The project focusses on how people make use of language when they give advice in everyday conversation compared to half a century ago, and how advice is taken up by the recipient. Advice giving in different forms and shapes is pervasive in human encounters, in professional as well as in private contexts. However, since, as we all know, it is very easy to step on people’s toes, advice giving is a notoriously complex and sensitive undertaking. The way speakers express themselves is therefore of crucial importance. This project aims to break new ground by mapping out what speakers do when they give advice in authentic everyday conversation and to describe and explain the consequences that their choices may have in different situations and among different groups of speakers, and how these practices have changed over time. The data are from the London–Lund Corpora. The brand new London–Lund Corpus 2, in particular, is of crucial importance. The release of the corpus to the public in February 2020 will fill a gap in the availability of data based on naturally occurring speech. This project has important implications for any area concerned with human communication, academic or otherwise.
See https://projekt.ht.lu.se/llc2/