Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date, research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages such as childhood and adolescence, ignoring, for the most part, healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of… read more
This paper explores how the cultural concept of the Irish Mammy is portrayed in the popular television comedy series ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’. Considering the historicity and cultural aspects surrounding essential views of Irishness that have shaped the archetype of the stereotype, we draw on a corpus… read more
This chapter aims to explore how pragmatic markers like and sure behave when investigated from an age and gender perspective. Using a small sociolinguistic-oriented corpus, the study adopts a multidisciplinary approach to reveal insights into socially-conditioned linguistic variation in Irish… read more
Schneider & Barron (2008) discuss the effect of macro-social factors such as region, ethnic background, age, social status and gender on intra-lingual pragmatic conventions, and state that, to date, they have received comparatively little attention in the study of pragmatics. This paper chooses two… read more
The use of phatic communion and small talk are obvious examples of how interpersonal relationships are built and maintained. This paper explores the use of vocatives, which play an equally important part in the affective realm of communication. This paper uses corpus-based tools and methodologies… read more
