The book focuses on language in Ireland and describes how social factors interact with pragmatic variation, thereby adding to our understanding of how language use varies across social dimensions and providing insights into how social identities imp

Pragmatics represents the study of language use in socially grounded contexts and it is thus a central discipline in Linguistics. Due to its focus on language use, it has been referred to as a transdiscipline that interacts with a broad variety of disciplines that are concerned with social action and, as such, pragmatics overlaps with many other linguistic and non-linguistic disciplines. Irish English is one of the earliest varieties of English to have attracted the interest of scholars working on pragmatic variation. From a sociolinguistic and a pragmatics perspective, it represents one of the best studied varieties of English and can thus be argued to offer important impulses to the study of variationist pragmatics in general. Ulster Scots, though in close contact with Irish English, has received less attention. Given this important position of Irish English in pragmatics research and the paucity of such research on (Ulster) Scots, this volume explicitly focuses on socio-pragmatics and deals with the way speakers in and around Ireland use language in a way so that it assists them in the construction of their social identities or helps them navigate socio-cultural spaces.

This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The seminal nature of this volume, its empirical orientation and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in pragmatics and sociolinguistics.

Researching Sociopragmatic Variability showcases a range of research approaches to the study of speech acts and pragmatic markers across different languages and varieties of a language, investigating native and non-native usages and variation across gender, situation and addressee.

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chapters are organised in a systematic fashion, and span a wide range of theoretical research on how language communicates multiple meanings in context, how it influences our daily interactions and relationships with others, and how it helps construct our social worlds. Providing insight into a fascinating array of phenomena and novel research directions, the Handbook is not only relevant to experts of pragmatics but to any reader with an interest in language and its use in different contexts, including researchers in sociology, anthropology and communication, and students of applied linguistics and related areas, as well as professional practitioners in communication research.

Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like, each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.

Sociolinguistics in Ireland takes a fresh look at the interface of language and society in present-day Ireland. In a series of specially commissioned chapters it examines the relationship of the Irish and English languages and traces their dynamic development both in history and at present.

The Sociophonetics of Dublin English shows how social inequalities and language are connected by the stances speakers take in interaction. It is based on an instrumental phonetic analysis of recorded interviews and broadcasting data and a detailed qualitative account of the same data as well as the socio-cultural context in Ireland. The analysis not only considers macro-social categories but also pragmatic norms and situational, more fluid aspects of communication. Contemporary social meanings and associated phonetic realisations are described and explained as the result of diachronic developments. Since the independence of Ireland local pronunciations have been re-evaluated and realisations connected with the former coloniser have fallen out of use even in formal and powerful domains. This investigation thus highlights the importance of diachronic data to understand contemporary sociolinguistic variation.

Irish English, while having been the focus of investigations on a variety of linguistic levels, reveals a dearth of research on the pragmatic level. In the present volume, this imbalance is addressed by providing much-needed empirical data on language use in Ireland in the private, official and public spheres and also by examining the use of Irish English as a reflection of socio-cultural norms of interaction. The contributions cover a wide range of pragmatic phenomena and draw on a number of frameworks of analysis. Despite the wide scope of topics and methodologies, a relatively coherent picture of conventions of language use in Ireland emerges. Indirectness and heterogeneity on the formal level are, for instance, shown to be features of Irish English. This volume is the first book-length treatment of the pragmatics of a national variety of English, or any other language. Indeed, it could be considered a first step towards a new discipline, variational pragmatics, at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology. This book is of primary interest to researchers and students in pragmatics, variational linguistics, Irish English, English as Foreign Language (EFL), cross-cultural communication and discourse analysis. Furthermore, the pragmatic descriptions provided will be of practical use in the increasingly important English as Second Language (ESL) context in Ireland. Finally, it is also of relevance to professionals dealing with Ireland and, indeed, to anyone interested in a deeper understanding of Irish culture.

Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency, form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics, grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis, it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology, results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.