The present study, situated in the area of variational pragmatics, contrasts tag question (TQ) use in Ireland and Great Britain using spoken data from the Irish and British components of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Analysis is on the formal and functional level and also investigates formfunctional relationships. Findings reveal many similarities in the use of TQs across the varieties. They also point, however, to a lower use of TQs in Irish English and in a range of variety-preferential features on both the formal and functional levels. The paper shows how an in-depth analysis of form-function relations together with a fine-tuned investigation of sub-functions gives an insight into formal preferences. Multilingua 2015; 34(4): 495-525 Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM Systematic contrastive analyses of TQs involving IrE and further Inner or Outer Circle varieties are lacking, as are systematic analyses of TQs confined to IrE itself. Indeed, the study of TQs in IrE is a very young endeavour. The majority of analyses focus on the level of form only (cf. Hickey 2007 and Hickey 2008; Kallen and Kirk 2012;Lucek 2011). Barron (forthcoming a), an analysis of TQ form and function in a specialised corpus of retail service-encounters, is an exception. Existing studies have reported reversed polarity between anchor and tag to be most frequent in IrE (cf. Barron forthcoming a; Hickey 2008: 242), a finding which is also reflected in BrE and AmE (cf. Tottie and Hoffmann 2006). However, Barron (forthcoming a), a study of a retail corpus of IrE, also finds positive constant polarity TQs to be particularly common relative to reference corpora of BrE and AmE. In addition, this study reports a comparatively high use of interrogative anchor constructions in IrE relative to BrE and AmE. Finally, on the level of function, Barron (forthcoming a) finds the confirmation-eliciting function (functionally equivalent to questions in the present analysis) to be the most frequent TQ function in the IrE retail corpus. However, in the absence of functional analyses of general corpora of IrE, she calls for further research to 496 Anne Barron et al. Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM 498 Anne Barron et al. Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM1 Other invariant tags, which are not discussed in this study, include single-word tags such as right, and okay, phonological sequences, such as eh and huh, and fixed phrases containing lexical material, such as (do) you know/see and I think. The tag innit? -the coalesced form of isn't it? -is also excluded. Tag questions across Irish English and British English 499 Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM
Her research interests centre on the English spoken in Ireland and include sociolinguistics, stylistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and pragmatics. Publications include An Introduction to Irish English (2010), the co-edited volumes Writing Orality (2009) and Fictionalising Orality, and a special issue of the journal Sociolinguistic Studies (2011). Other publications include articles in the journals Intercultural Pragmatics, English Language and Linguistics, Irish University Review and the International Journal of English Studies. Current research projects include CONVAR (Contact, Variation and Change) in collaboration with Kevin McCafferty, at the University of Bergen.
This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.
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