“Hurry up baby son all the boys is finished their breakfast”
-
Brian Clancy
Abstract
The data for this chapter comprises two corpora representing the intimate genre collected in the home/family environment: one from a middle class Irish family and one from a family belonging to the Irish Traveller community, an ethnic minority group accounting for less than 1% of the Irish population. The focus of the chapter is the occurrence of vocatives across the two corpora. The corpus frequency counts suggest that although the Traveller family use vocatives notably more frequently than the settled family, vocatives play a defining role in both families’ pragmatic systems. In general, vocatives in spoken English are associated with the marking of discourse boundaries (see, for example, Carter and McCarthy 2006). However, this chapter demonstrates that vocatives perform a predominantly mitigating function in both families.
Abstract
The data for this chapter comprises two corpora representing the intimate genre collected in the home/family environment: one from a middle class Irish family and one from a family belonging to the Irish Traveller community, an ethnic minority group accounting for less than 1% of the Irish population. The focus of the chapter is the occurrence of vocatives across the two corpora. The corpus frequency counts suggest that although the Traveller family use vocatives notably more frequently than the settled family, vocatives play a defining role in both families’ pragmatic systems. In general, vocatives in spoken English are associated with the marking of discourse boundaries (see, for example, Carter and McCarthy 2006). However, this chapter demonstrates that vocatives perform a predominantly mitigating function in both families.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The Pragmatics of Irish English and Irish 17
- “I always think of people here, you know, saying ‘like’ after every sentence” 37
- A corpus-based investigation of pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation in Irish English 65
- Kind of and sort of 89
- A comparative study of the pragmatic marker like in Irish English and in south-eastern varieties of British English 114
- “Actually, it’s unfair to say that I was throwing stones” 135
- “’Tis mad, yeah” 156
- Turn initiators in professional encounters 176
- “And your wedding is the twenty-second <.> of June is it?” 203
- “Hurry up baby son all the boys is finished their breakfast” 229
- Pragmatic markers as implicit emotive anchoring 248
- “Sure this is a great country for drink and rowing at elections” 270
- Blathering Beauties 292
- Pragmatic markers in contemporary radio advertising in Ireland 318
- “Yeah well, probably, you know I wasn’t that big into school, you know” 348
- “There’s, like, total silence again, roysh, and no one says anything” 370
- Now in the speech of newcomers to Ireland 390
- The significance of age and place of residence in the positional distribution of discourse like in L2 speech 408
- Name index 433
- Subject index 437
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The Pragmatics of Irish English and Irish 17
- “I always think of people here, you know, saying ‘like’ after every sentence” 37
- A corpus-based investigation of pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation in Irish English 65
- Kind of and sort of 89
- A comparative study of the pragmatic marker like in Irish English and in south-eastern varieties of British English 114
- “Actually, it’s unfair to say that I was throwing stones” 135
- “’Tis mad, yeah” 156
- Turn initiators in professional encounters 176
- “And your wedding is the twenty-second <.> of June is it?” 203
- “Hurry up baby son all the boys is finished their breakfast” 229
- Pragmatic markers as implicit emotive anchoring 248
- “Sure this is a great country for drink and rowing at elections” 270
- Blathering Beauties 292
- Pragmatic markers in contemporary radio advertising in Ireland 318
- “Yeah well, probably, you know I wasn’t that big into school, you know” 348
- “There’s, like, total silence again, roysh, and no one says anything” 370
- Now in the speech of newcomers to Ireland 390
- The significance of age and place of residence in the positional distribution of discourse like in L2 speech 408
- Name index 433
- Subject index 437
