Patricia Ronan

Categorizing expressive speech acts in the pragmatically annotated SPICE Ireland corpus

Abstract Expressive speech acts are one of the five basic categories of speech acts identified by Searle (1976). Expressives remain underresearched, though select categories of expressive speech acts, especially offering thanks and compliments, have received more extensive attention. An overall classification of expressive speech acts on the basis of corpus data has not yet been carried out. The current study provides a first survey of different types of expressive speech acts on the basis of three categories of spoken Irish English of different levels of formality: broadcast discussion, classroom discussion and face-to-face interaction. The data are extracted from the pragmatically tagged SPICE-Ireland corpus, a member of the International Corpus of English-family of corpora. The aim of the current study is to offer an overview and classification of expressives in the corpus material. Eight distinct subcategories of expressive speech acts are identified in this study. These categories are agreement, disagreement, volition, offering thanks, apologies, exclamations, expressions of sorrow and greetings.

Language Relations in Early Ireland

Since the Middle Ages, the linguistic landscapes of Ireland have clearly undergone massive changes, of which the most obvious one is the rise of English and the concomitant decline of Irish. Generally, in situations where different population groups, who are speakers of different linguistic varieties, come into contact, it is the language of the socio-economically more powerful group that will influence the language of the less powerful population group (e.g. Crystal 2002, Thomason 2001: 66, 77, Hickey 2010: 8). As far as the linguistic situation in Ireland is concerned, Crowley (2000: 1) observes that the relations between the two main languages of Ireland, English and Irish, are as complicated as the political relations between these two communities. In order to trace the linguistic influences of relative socio-economic differences, the lexicon of a language constitutes a good source. The language of the less powerful linguistic variety will typically incorporate a large number of loanwords from the more powerful variety, as the vocabulary is ‘an open class with a high degree of awareness by speakers’ (Hickey 2010: 8). In the following we will consider statements about population groups as well as semantic fields of loanwords taken from the languages in contact.

Modal would as a pragmatic softener in ICE Ireland

This paper investigates the attested pragmatic uses of would in selected spoken and written components of ICE Ireland. Different uses are discerned and the prominence of would as a marker of tentativeness, particularly in the spoken genres investigated, is noted. Innovative use of modal categories ties in with the assumption that change in the use of modal verbs happens in spoken genres, and it suggests that the use of would as a marker of tentativeness could be a rising use pattern in Irish English. Comparisons of frequency with research on other varieties of English show that some usage patterns differ from patterns so far observed in British English and can be compared to select Outer Circle varieties. These deviant uses in non-past non-hypothetical contexts seem to be due to an extension of tentative marking rather than a lack of distinction between modal would and future or volitional will marking.