Reality TV shows, such as First Dates Ireland, represent a site of gender co-construction which potentially influence audience language use conventions. At the same time, as largely unscripted discourse, such gender co-constructions may be claimed to mirror discursive patterns in Irish English. Research on Irish English in the media, particularly on unscripted media discourse, represents a research gap. Similarly, research on the interactional co-creation of gender roles in dating, and specifically in payment interaction, is limited, and represents a gap in the study of Irish English. The present paper explores gender co-construction as portrayed in payment negotiation interactions and experiential interview snippets broadcast on First Dates Ireland. Specifically, the study takes a metapragmatic perspective on heterosexual gender co-construction, with a focus on daters’ use of gendered categories, on their mobilisation of gender and on their indexing of stances towards discursive gender reproductions. Findings reveal both men and women to explicitly co-construct a traditional gendered identity and for these co-constructions to focus above all on men and their active role in extending payment offers. Men use metapragmatic references to gender and gender roles as objective grounders in payment offers. These serve a negative politeness strategy protecting women’s negative face. They also protect men’s positive face, ensuring that payment offers are not seen as social pleading, but rather dictated by social norms. Women use metapragmatic references to gender in offer acceptances, via compliments and gratitude, framing offers as socially appropriate. These references enhance men’s positive face, while protecting women’s negative face. Finally, challenges to norms, although not rejected outright, were negatively framed. The paper closes with a discussion of the implications of traditional gender reproduction in the media.
Only is widely used as an adverb like I was there only once, a conjunction, a postdeterminer, or a diminisher for a subjunct like I was there, only I didn’t have any time. In addition, in Irish English, only can also be used as an adverbial modifier of predicative adjectives in cases where other varieties of English would prefer the modifier just, as in she is only gorgeous. The current paper investigates how adjective and participle-premodifying only is used in Irish English and whether this use is variety specific. The study is carried out on the basis of data from the GloWbE corpus and compares the Irish element of the corpus to other international varieties of English. From this corpus, examples of only are culled semi-automatically and investigated manually. The paper argues for a specific usage pattern of only in Irish English and provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of this pattern. It suggests that the use of only as a premodifying intensifier is a variety-specific feature in Irish English.
Varieties of ‘Contact Irish English’ (CIE), i.e. English spoken by native Irish speakers, are often thought to display significant phonological influence from Irish (Hickey, 1986, 2007; Ó hÚrdail, 1997). However, modern systematic acoustic descriptions of CIE speech data are scarce, relative to other Irish English (IrE) varieties. This study investigates a phonological phenomenon often attributed to an Irish influence, that of epenthesis in words with liquid+sonorant coda clusters (LSCCs) e.g., in film [ˈfɪləm], in CIE spoken in the Connemara Gaeltacht, an Irish speaking region in the west of Ireland. We examine (i) the extent of LSCC epenthesis and effects of sociolinguistic factors and (ii) whether prosodic contours for epenthesized words are realized similarly to other disyllabic words in Connemara English. 314 LSCC token from sentences produced by 12 L1-Irish bilinguals and 12 English monolinguals were acoustically analysed using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2023) and IViE prosodic annotation (Grabe et al., 1998). Statistical findings indicate significantly higher epenthesis rates among bilinguals, with age, Language Profile Score (LPS) and cluster type affecting variation. Prosodically, epenthetic tokens predominantly portray low target tones L*_% (54%), particularly among women, irrespective of age. These results do not align with previous findings for prosodic realization of disyllabic words in Connemara English (Théveniaut & Herment, 2023). By providing empirical evidence, this study enhances our understanding of CIE phonology as well as the role of language contact in shaping phonetic and prosodic variation in bilingual communities.
This paper’s aim is to establish whether newcomers to Ireland (those born and raised outside Ireland and now resident in Ireland) can be designated as “new speakers” of IrE. The term “new speakers” is generally associated with later acquisition of a language. We extend it here to include new speakers of varieties of a language (IrE) in order to explore speaker identity in relation to IrE. Criteria identified by Jaffe (2015) to define new speakers include usage, self-attribution (identifying oneself as a speaker of a variety) and other-attribution (being recognised as one by some other group). Our main dataset consists of data gathered through semi-structured conversation-style interviews and follow-up sessions with 14 newcomers (both L1 and L2 English speakers) representative of the adult immigrant population in the Mid-West region of the Republic of Ireland. The interviews allowed both for the collection of naturally-occurring speech data, as well as eliciting speakers’ orientation and commitment to Ireland. In follow-up sessions, the participants identified features (pragmatic, grammatical, lexical and phonological) that they associated with IrE and reported their usage of such features. From this dataset, four participants were selected for in-depth analysis, two L1 English speakers (from USA) and two L2 English speakers (from Brazil). These pairs were chosen as they have similar language and cultural backgrounds. Both datasets were analysed qualitatively for evidence of self- and other-attribution as well as the features associated by the participants with IrE, and their naturally-occurring usage of these features. The findings revealed that participants both use and acknowledge their use of IrE features in particular contexts; they also report the ratification of their use of IrE features by others. However, there is a tendency to distance themselves from identifying as IrE speakers. This demonstrates how self- and other-attribution as regards usage of these features does not necessarily equate with self-identification as an IrE speaker.
