Chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in language understanding. In this study, we explore the potential of LLMs in assisting corpus-based linguistic studies through automatic annotation of texts with specific categories of linguistic information. Specifically, we examined to what extent LLMs understand the functional elements constituting the speech act of apology from a local grammar perspective, by comparing the performance of ChatGPT (powered by GPT-3.5), Bing chatbot (powered by GPT-4), and a human coder in the annotation task. The results demonstrate that Bing chatbot significantly outperformed ChatGPT in the task. Compared to human annotator, the overall performance of Bing chatbot was slightly less satisfactory. However, it already achieved high F1 scores: 99.95% for the tag of APOLOGISING, 91.91% for REASON, 95.35% for APOLOGISER, 89.74% for APOLOGISEE, and 96.47% for INTENSIFIER. Therefore, we propose that LLM-assisted annotation is a promising automated approach for corpus studies.

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