Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Pragmatics of Irish English and Irish

2015; John Benjamins Publishing Company; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1075/pbns.258.01hic

0922-842X

Raymond Hickey,

Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity

The Irish and English languages are spoken by groups of people who belong to the same cultural environment, i.e. both are Irish in the overall cultural sense. This study investigates whether the pragmatics of the Irish language and of Irish English are identical and, if not, to what extent they are different and where these differences lie. There are pragmatic categories in Irish which do not have formal equivalents in English, for instance, the vocative case, the distinction between singular and plural for personal pronouns (though vernacular varieties of Irish English do have this distinction). In addition there are discourse markers in Irish and Irish English which provide material for discussion, e.g. augmentatives and downtoners. Historically, the direction of influence has been from Irish to English but at the present the reverse is the case with many pragmatic particles from English being used in Irish. The data for the discussion stem from collections of Irish and Irish English which offer historical and present-day attestations of both languages.