This book is a timely addition to the considerable amount of research that has been carried out on the pragmatics of Irish English, which, as the editors acknowledge, is one of the earliest varieties of English to be studied in relation to pragmatic variation. The purpose of the book, stated in the opening chapter, is to illuminate the importance of social factors for the pragmatics of Irish English, which to date has been under-researched; the aim is to promote discussion on the impact of these social factors, not only on this variety, but also on the pragmatics of other language varieties.
The edited volume has two parts. Part 1, ‘Investigating sociolinguistic variables’, deals with pragmatic markers and pragmatic constructions, and combines sociolinguistics and pragmatics to provide different socio-pragmatic perspectives on pragmatic variation. Following the editors’ introduction in chapter 1, chapters 2 to 7 focus on individual markers. In its focus on particular markers, part 1 develops and expands on some of the items discussed in Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty and Elaine Vaughan’s volume, Pragmatic Markers in Irish English (Reference Amador-Moreno, McCafferty and Vaughan2015) – for instance, now, kind of, sure and newer (in the Irish context) markers like yeah, no (YN) and the expressive X-much structure (e.g. boring much?).
In chapter 2, ‘The sociopragmatics of now in corpora of Irish English and Scottish English’ (pp. 11–30), Brian Clancy and Elaine Vaughan compare the functions of now as a pragmatic marker in Irish English and Scottish English, and they usefully complement this with a sociolinguistic profile of the users of this item based on the corpus metadata. Using datasets from ICE-Ireland (a subcorpus of the International Corpus of English) and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS), they show that pragmatic use of now is more frequent in Southern Irish English than in Northern Irish English and Scottish English. Factors such as regional distribution, age and gender are examined in relation to this marker. Interestingly, more use of pragmatic now is observed in younger speakers of Irish English compared with Scottish English; however, the findings in relation to age and gender are inconclusive. The authors use this opportunity to warn of the limitations as regards definitive results when two corpora have been designed using different criteria, and they underscore the importance of comparability in corpora. However, they also point out that the study demonstrates that, despite such limitations, this should not discourage us from carrying our comparative studies, as they can lead to valuable observations, which might otherwise be missed. For example, findings, such as a greater frequency of now as deictic presentative in the SCOTS data, led to the observation that in SCOTS much of the data of the private/personal subcorpus includes texts representing interactions between parents and children. This is noteworthy in light of the authors’ finding in their initial study that now as a deictic presentative was used in parent–children interactions in Irish English (Clancy & Vaughan Reference Clancy, Vaughan, Migge and Chosáin2012).
Again, with the focus on an individual pragmatic marker, in chapter 3, ‘Lookit – The story of a pragmatic marker in Irish English’ (pp. 31–44), Raymond Hickey examines the pragmaticalisation of the marker lookit. He uses written data from twentieth-century writers as well as data from ICE-Ireland, and also includes in his analysis oral conversational data which he collected between 2014 and 2020. As regards the latter dataset, it would be useful to have more information on the profile of the informants. From his present-day dataset, he finds that lookit is used by the speaker to request that the interlocutor accept a particular situation, or as an appeal or a demand for the interlocutor to agree with the speaker. Hickey uses data from the Limerick Corpus of Irish English to corroborate this, and he concludes that the marker has become enregistered in Irish English – i.e. there is awareness of a linguistic item among large sections of the general public. Of particular interest here, in relation to a similar observation by Stephen Lucek (chapter 9), who investigates language use in a fictional TV series, is the finding that pragmatic markers tend not to be evenly distributed across speakers and that individual speakers may show a preference for a particular marker. Hickey notes that this is a particular characteristic of pragmatic markers, which by their nature afford the speaker more personal choice than do, for example, syntactic structures.
Chapter 4 by Ana María Terrazas-Calero, ‘“Er, yeah, no, bummer”: An exploration of the “new” discourse pragmatic marker Yeah, No in contemporary Irish English fiction’ (pp. 45–68), uses Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll Kelly series of novels to carry out a diachronic study of the representation of marker Yeah, No (YN) in Irish English. Drawing on her 1.5-million-word Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Corpus (CoROCK), which consists of twelve full-length novels spanning the period 2007–18, the author highlights key milestones in the development of the YN marker (for example, 2009 is the year YN first appears) and subsequent pragmatic development, including new, previously undocumented (inter)personal functions. The chapter highlights the power of mediatisation in showing how the way in which the marker is used in the novels is associated with a particular socio-pragmatic variety of Irish English and becomes indexical of a particular social class. The study showcases how corpus linguistics, corpus stylistics and corpus pragmatics can be combined as a methodological basis for such studies.
Chapter 5, ‘New speakers of Irish English: Pragmatic and sociophonetic perspectives’ (pp. 69–86), co-authored by Marion Schulte and Bettina Migge, is an important one, not only in addressing a gap in research on phonological socio-pragmatic variation but also in its contribution to the increasing body of research on ‘New Speakers’ of Irish English. The focus of the research is on the phonetic, syntactic and pragmatic features of the pragmatic marker kind of in the discourse of immigrants to Ireland who are L1 speakers of Polish, based on sociolinguistic interviews. Findings indicate that L2 users innovate by extending the use of kind of to new contexts, positioning them as slightly apart from L1 Irish English speakers. The important takeaway from this chapter is the suggestion that this can be interpreted, not in terms of deficit, but as complex identity work influenced by speaker ideologies. The chapter also highlights the importance of sociophonetic analysis in socio-pragmatic variation studies.
In chapter 6, ‘Pragmatic markers in Ulster Irish and Irish English’ (pp. 87–106), Dónall Ó Baoill investigates the extent to which the use of pragmatic markers sure and now in Ulster Irish parallel or mirror similar uses found in dialects of Irish English and, if so, how we can account for such similarities. Using data from the Modern Irish dialect of North West Donegal, Ó Baoill finds a number of parallelisms between the use of these two markers in Irish English and Ulster Irish. The study highlights the need to take account of contact languages in consideration of the use and development of pragmatic markers. It also points to the need for a comprehensive study of Irish language pragmatics and its relationship with Irish English, an area which has been largely neglected both in lexicography and Irish language programmes. The study sheds light on these two much-researched markers and, importantly, offers alternatives to previous interpretations on their source.
In chapter 7, ‘Boring much? Semantic determinants of constructional attraction in Irish English’ (pp. 107–30), Martin Schweinberger and Patricia Ronan use the corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE) in their study of the evaluative expressive marker, the X-much structure, as in boring much!?, in Irish and Australian English. Although both varieties show negative sentiment items in the X-slot of the X-much structure, Australian English shows a significant preference for emotional words and negative sentiment items in the structure, whereas in Irish English there is no significant attraction of emotional words. The authors attribute the higher frequencies of the X‑much structure in Australian English as compared to Irish English to the former having a larger functional range. Interestingly, despite the large amount of data provided by GloWbE, the actual occurrence of the structure was small, therefore compromising the reliability of the statistical analysis. The study nevertheless highlights the value of GloWbE in researching intervarietal comparisons in the use of pragmatic structures. It also underscores the importance of considering variety-specific features in the analysis of pragmatic structures.
Moving on to part 2, ‘Metapragmatic structures: Identities, styles and media’, the chapters in this section are based around factors that influence metapragmatic variation and also the influences of language ideology and social factors on pragmatic variation.
This second part begins with Jeffrey L. Kallen’s chapter on the use of the ICE-Ireland corpus to analyse narratives (chapter 8, ‘“Oh wait and I tell you …”: Narratives, pragmatics, and style in ICE-Ireland’, pp. 133–54). Kallen describes how, despite the challenges of identifying different types of narratives in the corpus due to the way it is structured, narratives serve as a valuable but as yet under-used resource for investigating pragmatic variation. The study highlights the importance of interactional factors combined with situational factors in impacting the choice and distribution of pragmatic markers in this genre. The transcripts of the narratives in the chapter make fascinating reading in themselves and showcase the skill and creativity of the narrators in storytelling. We can see firsthand how they engage their listeners through the range of discourse features and stylistic elements which characterise this genre. Kallen concludes the chapter with a number of suggestions for cross-corpus analysis, both within and across ICE corpora, which provide exciting opportunities for future research.
In chapter 9, ‘Irish identities in a fictional TV series: Mediatised performance of Derry English in Derry Girls’ (pp. 155–72), Stephen Lucek examines language use in the fictional TV series Derry Girls, and asks what media performance of language can show us about enregistered features of a variety. Lucek focuses on two features: pragmatic marker like and the second-person plural pronouns, including the standard you and the non-standard ye and yous(e). The rationale for focusing on these two particular items is not made explicit, although the author does point out that the pronoun yous(e) is the preferred option for the Northern Ireland component of ICE-Ireland. The corpus-based study shows that while specific characters in the TV series use these vernacular features, the majority of the cast use standardised Northern Irish English. What is remarkable here is that the characters appear to be depending on the Derry accent rather than lexical features to give them authenticity. Lucek also questions why the writer does not distribute pragmatic variants evenly, but rather chooses to ‘place them in the mouths’ (p.168) of characters who originate from Derry. He writes that the analysis shows that the language used in the series is generally representative of Derry English but adds the caveat that this ‘is driven by two actors, both of whom are originally from Derry’ (p. 155). This raises the question as to whether these actors used the local features spontaneously rather than them being scripted. As discussed above in relation to Hickey’s chapter, the media data analysis shows that there is a tendency for particular speakers to show a preference for particular markers. The study highlights the opportunities for researchers to use open-source TV or film transcripts in studying pragmatic variation.
Irish English and Scots/Scottish English are the varieties which Christine Elsweiler and Patricia Ronan focus on in chapter 10, ‘Salutation and leavetaking formulae in 18th-century varieties of English’ (pp. 173–204). This chapter looks at socio-pragmatic variation by analysing salutations and leavetaking formulae in eighteenth-century Irish and Scottish letters. Using a politeness scale based on Nevala (Reference Nevala, Taavitsainen and Jucker2003), salutations and leavetakings are classified so as to capture ‘more fine-grained nuances’ (p.182) located between the negative and the positive ends, with the majority typically being made up of varying combinations of positive and negative terms. The analysis in regard to the impact of social status is based on the metadata for the letters, and uses the categories of ‘up’ (i.e. writing to a person of higher social status), ‘equal’ (i.e. writing to a person of similar social status) and ‘down’ (i.e. writing to a person of lower status). The authors find that social status (of both letter writer and recipient) is important in the choice of terms used. More variation is evident in the letters to addressees of equal social status to the writer, leading ultimately to pragmatic change, with letters to addressees of different social status remaining more conservative. Variety-specific differences, however, were not found in the data. The data used in the study is fascinating, and the fact that the metadata is available sheds light on the impact of social factors on pragmatic variation.
Finally, in chapter 11, ‘Automatically detecting directives with SPICE Ireland’ (pp. 205–34), Gerold Schneider explores the extent to which machine learning approaches can be used in pragmatic annotation and analysis. He trains an automatic system to automatically detect directives in English using the SPICE Ireland corpus. He evaluates the automatic classification and compares directives in Irish English with directives in British English by using lexical signals in the datasets. The study shows that the Irish English data contains significantly more directives than the British English data, except in formal contexts. However, Schneider warns that, as the automatic classification is better for explicit, overt directives than for indirect implicit directives, we need to be aware that the results may be affected by this bias; this highlights the importance of contextual, social and situational factors and prosodic features in decoding pragmatic features. This study is valuable in highlighting technological innovations in the field and in analysing the pros and cons of using machine learning in pragmatic annotation and analysis.
On the whole, the book brings together a range of studies from international experts in the field of pragmatics. Although John Kirk himself does not author a chapter in this book, it is fitting that the editors explicitly acknowledge, in the opening and concluding chapters, the significant role that his work has played in Irish English pragmatics and corpus pragmatics research generally, and also more specifically in the studies in this book.
While the book showcases the work of key researchers in the field, more exploration of sociophonetic perspectives on socio-pragmatic variation, for example, the sociophonetics of Dublin English (e.g. the work of Fergus O’Dwyer and also that of Marion Schulte) would complement the chapter on New Speakers of Irish English, which includes sociophonetic analysis.
Additionally, in contrast to Amador-Moreno et al.’s (Reference Amador-Moreno, McCafferty and Vaughan2015) publication, although it is discussed in some chapters (e.g. Stephen Lucek looks at utterance-final like in chapter 9), there is less focus on the use of like in this more recent volume, with no chapter dedicated entirely to the socio-pragmatics of like. While this may reflect researcher fatigue with this item, which has come under such intense scrutiny in recent decades, nevertheless it would be interesting to have a focus on how this item has developed in the last decade, especially in relation to socio-pragmatic variation and identity in the Irish context. For example, Marion Schulte’s investigation of the sociophonetics of like in Dublin English would showcase more recent developments with regard to this ubiquitous item.
While ‘identities’ is part of the subtitle (Using Pragmatic Variation to Construct Social Identities), I would have expected more explicit focus on how socio-pragmatic variation relates to identity across the chapters, which would have nicely complemented Hickey & Amador-Moreno’s (Reference Hickey and Amador-Moreno2020) recent volume, which deals with sociolinguistic perspectives on Irish identities. It is notable that the index indicates only three references to identity, but this could be more of a shortcoming of the indexing process than of the book itself; for example, Terrazas-Calero’s chapter on Yeah No has a specific section on identity construction.
The datasets, both historical and contemporary, make fascinating reading and whet the readers’ appetite for further research using these resources. Corpus studies feature strongly and the studies expose us to a variety of research methods. As is common with edited volumes, the contributors appear to have been given considerable freedom in the structure of their particular chapter. While research questions are only explicitly stated in a few chapters, most chapters follow a broadly similar structure with detailed background information, review of previous studies and clear descriptions of methodologies, followed by findings, discussion and ideas for further research. The makes the book quite accessible and reader friendly, especially for students in the field.
Overall, this is a valuable collection, which serves not only to advance but also to celebrate the groundwork done by John Kirk and is a welcome addition to previous works on Irish English.
