How to Keep a Listener’s Attention in Irish English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35903/teanga.v13i.11066Keywords:
literal to figurative meaning, pragmatics, corpora, data analysis, vernacular Irish English, attention maintenance, backchannellingAbstract
Vernacular Irish English shows a number of discourse devices, using intensifiers and intensifying structures, deriving from literal meanings but used metaphorically. These involve various kinds of appeals to the listener and make use of constructions expressing directionality. The present study attempts to offer a taxonomy of these devices and seeks to characterise them as means to arouse and maintain the listener’s attention. Their occurrence is confined to highly colloquial forms of language and for this reason are not attested widely in corpora, such as the ICE-Ireland corpus. Nonetheless, the spoken section of the southern Ireland files do provide some documentation of the vernacular discourse devices being discussed here and thus offer support for the interpretation offered in the present study. The diachronic Corpus of Irish English allows one to trace the transition from a literal to a conventionalised figurative meaning for many of these structures.
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