Appropriateness in discourse: The adjectives surprised and surprising in monologue and dialogue

This paper addresses the notion of appropriateness in discourse. Its aim is two-fold: first, to apply the theoretical concept of appropriateness to data taken from the British National Corpus and second, to discuss the connection between discourse types (monologue vs. dialogue) and the evaluation of appropriateness.The quantitative distribution of surprised + that-clause and surprising + that-clause in discourse reveals clear preferences in usage: whereas surprised + that-clause is found more frequently in dialogical contexts, surprising + that-clause typically occurs in discourse settings close to monologues. A qualitative analysis in terms of speech act theory demonstrates that the locutionary acts of both realizations are essentially the same but the illocutionary acts are different: whereas surprised + that-clause expresses an emotion, surprising + that-clause conveys a judgement.