Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T19:23:59.515Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The pragmatics of Irish English

The use of English in Ireland shows specific features which contribute to its unique profile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2011

Elaine Vaughan  and
Brian Clancy
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The utterance It's raining (of great relevance to the Irish!) can have a variety of different meanings according to who says it, to whom one is talking, and where it is said, amongst other things. The fact that language in use (whether in spoken or written mode) is obviously much more than the sum of its constituent parts – the individual sounds that make up words, the combinations of words that create sentences or utterances, the meaning that can be derived from different words and combinations thereof – has been what has driven pragmatics as a discipline, from its origins in the philosophy of language. Initially, what drove the research agenda was the potential of words to perform acts, or speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), and later, the complexities of the relationship between what is said and what is meant, the study of conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975) or ‘how people can understand one another beyond the literal words that are spoken’ (Eelen, 2001: 2). Pragmatics is now an inherently inter-disciplinary approach which has as its central orientation this study of, essentially, how speaker meaning is interpreted in context. Critical to interpretation is the concept of context itself, a complex and multi-layered notion involving cultural setting, speech situation and shared background assumptions (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992). Linguistic choices made by conversational participants can simultaneously encode situational indices of position and time, and interpersonal and cultural indices such as power, status, gender and age. Pragmatic research comprises a diverse range of research strands including how linguistic choices encode politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Watts, 2003), reference and deixis (Levinson, 2004) and the relationship between domain specific discourse, such as workplace or media discourse, and specialised pragmatic characteristics (O'Keeffe, Clancy and Adolphs, 2011). Thus, pragmatics provides, as Christie (2000: 29) maintains, ‘a theoretical framework that can account for the relationship between the cultural setting, the language user, the linguistic choices the user makes, and the factors that underlie those choices’.

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 47 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amador Moreno, C. 2005. ‘Discourse markers in Irish English: An example from literature.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 73–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkinson, D. & Kelly-Holmes, H. 2011. ‘Codeswitching, identity and ownership in Irish radio comedy’. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(1), 251–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barron, A. 2005. ‘Offering in Ireland and England.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 141–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds) 2005. The Pragmatics of Irish English, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. 2008. ‘The structure of requests in Irish English and English English.’ In Schneider, K. & Barron, A. (eds), Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 35–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. 2009. ‘Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction.’ Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(4), 425–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Binchy, J. 2005. ‘Three forty two so please: Politeness for sale in Southern-Irish service encounters.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 313–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bousfield, D. 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christie, C. 2000. Gender and Language: Towards a Feminist Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clancy, B. 2005. ‘You're fat. You'll eat them all: Politeness strategies in family discourse.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 177–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clancy, B. & Vaughan, E. forthcoming 2011. ‘Oh will you now?”: A Pragmatic analysis of the use of now in contemporary Irish English’, English World Wide.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. 1996. ‘Towards an anatomy of impoliteness.’ Journal of Pragmatics 25, 349–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eelen, G. 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St. John's Publishers.Google Scholar
Farr, F. 2005. ‘Relational strategies in the discourse of professional performance review in an Irish academic environment: The case of language teacher education.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 203–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farr, F. & O'Keeffe, A. 2002. ‘Would as a hedging device in an Irish context: An intra-varietal comparison of institutionalised spoken interaction.’ In Reppen, R., Fitzmaurice, S. & Biber, D. (eds), Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 25–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farr, F. & Murphy, B. 2009. ‘Religious references in contemporary Irish English’, Journal of Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(4), 535–59.Google Scholar
Farr, F.Murphy, B. & O'Keeffe, A. 2004. ‘The Limerick Corpus of Irish English: Design, description and application.’ Teanga, 21, 5–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, C. & Duranti, A. 1992. ‘Rethinking context: An introduction.’ In Duranti, A. & Goodwin, C. (eds), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–43.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. 1975. ‘Logic and conversation.’ In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (eds), Syntax and Semantics Vol. 3. London: Academic Press, pp. 41–58.Google Scholar
Hickey, R. 2002. A Source Book for Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, R. 2005. ‘Irish English in the context of previous research.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 17–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, R. 2007. Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, B. 2001. ‘Violation of Grice's conversational conventions as humour in Irish and American television comedies.’ Teanga, 20, 94–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallen, J. L. 2005a. ‘Politeness in Ireland: “In Ireland, it's done without being said”.’ In Hickey, L. & Stewart, M. (eds), Politeness in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 130–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallen, J. L. 2005b. ‘Silence and mitigation in Irish English discourse.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 47–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallen, J. L. & Kirk, J. M. 2008a. ICE-Ireland: A User's Guide. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar
Kallen, J. L. & Kirk, J. M. 2008b. SPICE-Ireland: A User's Guide. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. 2004. ‘Deixis.’ In Horn, L. & Ward, G. L. (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 97–121.Google Scholar
Locher, M. A. 2004. Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, B. 2009. ‘“She's a fucking ticket”: The pragmatics of FUCK in Irish English – an age and gender perspective.’ Corpora, 4(1), 85–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, B. 2010. Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Keeffe, A. 2005. ‘You've a daughter yourself? A corpus-based look at question forms in an Irish radio phone-in.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 339–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Keeffe, A. 2006. Investigating Media Discourse. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Keeffe, A. & Adolphs, S. 2008. ‘Response tokens in British and Irish discourse: Corpus, context and variational pragmatics.’ In Schneider, K. & Barron, A. (eds), Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 69–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Keeffe, A.Clancy, B. & Adolphs, S. 2011. Introducing Pragmatics in Use. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, K. P. 2005. ‘No problem, you're welcome, anytime: Responding to thanks in Ireland, England and the USA.’ In Barron, A. & Schneider, K. (eds), The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 101–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, K. P. & Barron, A. 2008. ‘Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational pragmatics.’ In Schneider, K. & Barron, A. (eds), Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schweinberger, M. forthcoming. ‘Analysis of the sociolinguistic distribution of LIKE in Irish English.’ In Koll-Stobbe, A. & Bieswanger, M. (eds), Proceedings from the 10 Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium, March 2009. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, R. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, W.Schilling-Estes, N. 2006. American English. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar