To Be, or To Unbe – That is the Question: Exploring the Pragmatic Nature of the Un-Verbs

The following contribution is part of an ongoing investigation (Fruttaldo 2017) and will focus on a particular class of verbs, which in the literature has been defined as the class of the un-verbs. Nowadays, this class of verbs is in continuous evolution as more and more verbs can be preceded by the prefix un- (Cordisco 2011; Zimmer et al. 2011). Therefore, through a corpus-based analysis (McEnery et al. 2006; McEnery and Hardie 2012), we will try to offer some generalisations on the semantic and pragmatic nature of this class of verbs. In order to achieve this purpose, our investigation focuses on the analysis of a corpus of the main sections of Facebook, Google+ and Myspace’s Help Centres. The corpus has been analysed through the online corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004; Kilgarriff et al. 2014), which has allowed us to investigate the specific occurrences of the un-verbs found in our corpus and draw given generalisations on their linguistic behaviour.