The pragmatics of margin comments: An empirical study

摘要

This paper describes the design and rationale behind a classification scheme for English margin comments. The scheme's design was informed by pragmatics and pedagogy theory, and by observations made from a corpus of 24,387 margin comments from assessed university assignments. The purpose of the scheme is to computationally explore content and form relationships between margin comments and the passages to which they point. The process of designing the scheme resulted in the conclusion that margin comments require more work to understand than utterances do, and that they are more prone to being misunderstood.