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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.55-69
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 05 Dec 2021 Revised 24 Jan 2022 Accepted 30 Jan 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202201.55

Mapping Speech Act Studies (2000-2020): A Bibliometric Analysis

Zongfeng Xia ; Fengguang Liu ; Yaochen Deng ; Se-Eun Jhang
(1st author) Lecturer / PhD Student, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China, P. R. xiazongfeng@dlufl.edu.cn
(co-author) Professor, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China, P. R. liufengguang@dlufl.edu.cn
(co-author) Professor, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China, P. R. deng_yaochen@163.com
(corresponding author) Professor, Korea Maritime and Ocean University, Korea jhang@kmou.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study explores the state of speech act research in the past two decades. It employes a bibliometric method to examine the publication trend, the most frequently discussed topics, the most influential articles, the main publication venues, and distribution among countries/regions in the area of speech act studies. The results show that the annual publications increased dramatically with an upward trend. The results concerning the most frequently addressed topics suggest that speech act study has been a fruitful domain featuring with more interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies involving with more sociolinguist methodologies, such as discourse completion test, focus group interviews and so on, to do empirical studies. Citation and research areas results indicate that the issues about speech acts explored by most studies are not constrained within linguistics or pragmatics, usually involving multidisciplinary research areas, such as philosophy, computer science, psychology, communication and so on. Results about most productive countries or regions present that most considerable and influential publications still come out of English speaking countries and European countries, while due to the more globalized world and development in international cooperation, more and more publications are coauthored by researchers from different countries and regions, which may further prove the heterogeneous nature of speech act research.

Keywords:

speech act, bibliometric analysis, research trend, research topics, publication venues

Acknowledgments

This study was supported in part by China’s National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science grant 18BYY126.

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