Bróna Murphy

Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk

Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date, research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages such as childhood and adolescence, ignoring, for the most part, healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of scrutiny. This book examines the discourse of adulthood and accounts for sociolinguistic variation, with regards to age and gender, through the exploration of a 90,000 word age-and gender-differentiated spoken corpus of Irish English. The book explores both the distribution and use of a number of high frequency pragmatic features of spoken discourse that appear as key items in the corpus. Part 1 of the book provides an introduction, a theoretical overview of age as a sociolinguistic variable and a description on how to compile a small spoken corpus for sociolinguistic research. Part 2 consists of five chapters which investigate and explore key features such as hedges, vague category markers, intensifiers, boosters and high-frequent items of taboo language in relation to the variables, age and gender. The book is of interest to undergraduates or postgraduates taking formal courses in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics or discourse analysis. It is also of interest to students and researchers interested in using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research.

Religious references in contemporary Irish English: 'For the love of God almighty .... I'm a holy terror for turf'

Abstract This article examines the nature and use of religious references across a range of contexts, and also age and gender groups to establish their patterning and functioning in contemporary English, with particular reference to Irish English. The examination is carried out by using quantitative and qualitative corpus-based tools and methodologies, such as relative frequency lists and concordances, as well as details of formulaic strings, including significant clusters. The paper highlights that religious references are high frequency items in informal spoken discourse and that they are predominantly used in non-religious contexts. In terms of age, their use seems to be characteristic of the discourse of the older speakers, while a gender-based analysis underlines their elevated use by male speakers. The analyses conclude that religious references are so commonplace in Irish English that their use, as a means of emotional expression, now seems almost ubiquitously acceptable among the represented groups, and when used, these items do not seem to cause offense.

‘She's a fucking ticket’: the pragmatics of fuck in Irish English – an age and gender perspective

In this paper, I examine the pragmatics of fuck in terms of age and gender in an Irish English context. The paper aims to explore sociolinguistic variation in the use of this taboo form by using quantitative and qualitative corpus-based tools and methodologies, which include relative frequency lists and concordances, as well as details of formulaic strings, including significant clusters. I show that fuck is a high-frequency item in everyday talk. I illustrate that, in terms of age and gender, fuck occurs most frequently among male speakers in their twenties. I also focus on fucking as an extremely emotionally charged form that is a high frequency item in the interactions of both the males in their twenties and the males in their forties. I note that the use of this form brings a certain dramatic intensity or dynamism to their discourse. I attribute this intensity to being a feature of how males interact. I conclude by discussing other variables at play in the data.

A Corpus-based investigation of critical reflective practice and context in early career teacher settings

Reflective practice is at the core of teacher education programmes and is highly regarded as an essential component in the education of new and experienced teachers. Given the recent interest in language use and the role of discourse in articulating knowledge of one’s practice, this paper focuses on how two groups of early career teachers from distinct teaching contexts engage in reflection. The study aims to (i) investigate how they reflect and (ii) explore to what extent their reflections may be influenced by their contexts. The paper mines two small written sub-corpora, which are part of the larger 200,000-word Corpus of Reflective Practice (CoRP). Using corpus-based tools and methodologies, the paper identifies distinct trends which reveal insights into different conceptualisations of reflective practice. As a result, the paper raises awareness of the need to consider (inter)national cultural sensitivity, and questions the assumption that early career reflective practice is flexible enough to work across cultural, social and institutional differences and influences without more careful guidance and consideration. The paper also highlights a predominant shared trait across the data which signals the need to see reflective practice as a process and to value the kind of reflective practice in which early practitioners engage as being reflective of their stage in the process.

BAAL/CUP Seminars 2009.

The Moray House School of Education, The University of Edinburgh, UK; 7–8 May 2009 The seminar, organised by Joan Cutting and Brona Murphy, aimed • to bring together researchers involved in both emergent and established academic corpora (written and spoken) as well as linguists, lecturers and teachers researching in education, be it language teaching, language-teacher training or continuing professional development in language awareness, all of whom may be new to corpora and its applications; • to explore the possibilities of working together with researchers in speech recognition and synthesis, and other specialists in technological innovation; • to provide an opportunity to disseminate the latest developments in academic language corpora. The seminar strengthened links between institutions and created networks for researchers to explore ways that corpora can help to study general classroom practice and be used as part of language classroom teaching. It attracted 30 participants from universities in the Czech Republic, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, Japan, Switzerland and the UK; there were two plenary papers and 14 individual papers.