Article published in:
English World-Wide
Vol. 41:1 (2020) ► pp. 89–117

Speech-unit final like in Irish English

| The University of Queensland
This paper investigates the use of speech-unit final like (SUF like) in standard Irish English (IrE) and takes a variationist approach based on the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-IRL). The analysis includes both sociolinguistic factors (age, gender, occupation type, religious affiliation, conversation type, audience size, type and zone of residence) and a psycholinguistic factor (priming). The statistical analysis extends previous research on SUF like in that it applies the principle of accountability and shows that priming significantly facilitates SUF like use, that SUF like has increased between an earlier (1990–1994) and a later phase (2002–2005) of data collection and that, between 2002 and 2005, SUF like use correlates negatively with audience size but not so in data collected between 1990 and 1994. The relative absence of significant social stratification of SUF like use suggests that SUF like continues to be a frequent feature of standard IrE and substantiates that it is a linguistic marker of Irish identity.
Keywords: Irish English, discourse like , discourse markers, variationist, sociolinguistics, quantitative analysis
Published online: 24 February 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00041.sch
Sources

Sources

Du Bois, John W., Wallace L. Chafe, Charles Meyer, Sandra A. Thompson, Robert Englebretson, and Nii Martey
2000–2005 Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts 1–4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
ICE Ireland
International Corpus of English. Compiled at Queen’s University Belfast.

References

Althaus, Scott L. and Young Mie Kim
2006 “Priming Effects in Complex Information Environments: Reassessing the Impact of News Discourse on Presidential Approval”. Journal of Politics 68: 960–976. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Amador-Moreno, Carolina P.
2005 “Discourse Markers in Irish English: An Example from Literature”. In Anne Barron, and Klaus P. Schneider, eds. The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: De Gruyter, 73–100. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 “A Corpus-Based Approach to Contemporary Irish Writing: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s Use of ‘Like’ as a Discourse Marker”. International Journal of English Studies 12: 19–38. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015 “ ‘There’s, Like, Total Silence Again, Roysh, and no one Says Anything’: Fictional Representations of ‘New’ DMs and Quotatives in Irish English”. In Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, eds. Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 370–389. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Amador-Moreno, Carolina P. and Ana Maria Terrazas-Calero
2017 “Encapsulating Irish English in Literature”. World Englishes 36: 254–268. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Andersen, Gisle
1997 “They Like Wanna See Like how we Talk and All that: The Use of Like as a Discourse Marker in London Teenage Speech”. In Magnus Ljung, ed. Corpus-Based Studies in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 37–48.Google Scholar
1998 “The Pragmatic Marker Like from a Relevance-Theoretic Perspective”. In Andreas H. Jucker, and Yael Ziv, eds. Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 147–170. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2000 The Role of the Pragmatic Marker Like in Utterance Interpretation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2001 Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald
2008 Analyzing Linguistic Data. A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Barron, Anne, Irina Pandarova, and Karolin Muderack
2015 “Tag Questions across Irish English and British English: A Corpus Analysis of Form and Function”. Multilingua 34: 495–525. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bartlett, Joanne
2013 “ ‘Oh I just Talk Normal, Like’: A Corpus-Based, Longitudinal Study of Constituent-Final Like in Tyneside English”. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 19: 1–21.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan
2008 “English Dialects in the North of England. Morphology and Syntax”. In Bernd Kortmann, and Clive Upton, eds. Varieties of English. Vol 1: The British Isles. Berlin: De Gruyter, 373–403.Google Scholar
Beggs, John J., Valerie A. Haines, and Jeanne S. Hurlbert
1996 “Revisiting the Rural-Urban Contrast: Personal Networks in Nonmetropolitan and Metropolitan Settings”. Rural Sociology 61: 306–325. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Binchy, James
2005 “Three Forty Two so Please: Politeness for Sale in Southern-Irish Service Encounters”. In Anne Barron, and Klaus P. Schneider, eds. The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: De Gruyter, 313–335. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel
1996 Pragmatic Markers in English. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Columbus, Georgie
2009 “Irish Like as an Invariant Tag: Evidence from ICE-Ireland”. Paper presented at American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL) 2009, University of Alberta.
Corrigan, Karen P.
2010 Dialects of English: Irish English. Vol. 1: Northern Ireland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
2015 “ ‘I Always Think of People Here, you Know, Saying ‘Like’ after every Sentence’: The Dynamics of Discourse-Pragmatic Markers in Northern Irish English”. In Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, eds. Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 37–64. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dailey-O’Cain, Jennifer
2000 “The Sociolinguistic Distribution of and Subjective Attitudes toward Focuser Like and Quotative Like ”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 60–80. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
D’Arcy, Alexandra
2005 “LIKE: Syntax and Development”. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
2006 “Lexical Replacement and the Like(s)”. American Speech 81: 339–357. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2007 “LIKE and Language Ideology: Disentangling the Fact from Fiction”. American Speech 82: 386–419. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2008 “Canadian English as a Window to the Rise of ‘Like’ in Discourse”. Anglistik 19: 125–140.Google Scholar
2017 Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight Hundred Years of Like. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diskin, Chloe
2013 “Integration and Identity: Acquisition of Irish-English by Polish and Chinese Migrants in Dublin, Ireland”. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 19: 67–89.Google Scholar
2017 “The Use of the Discourse-Pragmatic Marker ‘Like’ by Native and Non-Native Speakers of English in Ireland”. Journal of Pragmatics 120: 144–157. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Field, Andy, Jeremy Miles, and Zoë Field
2012 Discovering Statistics Using R. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Fuller, Janet M.
2003 “Use of the Discourse Marker Like in Interviews”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 365–377. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th
2005 “Syntactic Priming: A Corpus-Based Approach”. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34: 365–399. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 Statistics for Linguists with R. A Practical Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 “Sources of Variability Relevant to the Cognitive Sociolinguist, and Corpus- as well as Psycholinguistic Methods and Notions to Handle them”. Journal of Pragmatics 52: 5–16. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. and Martin Hilpert
2010 “Modeling Diachronic Change in the Third Person Singular: A Multifactorial, Verb- and Author-Specific Exploratory Approach”. English Language and Linguistics 14: 293–320. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hancil, Sylvie
2017 “Final but in Northern Englishes”. In Sylvie Hancil, and Joan C. Beal, eds. Perspectives on Northern Englishes. Berlin: De Gruyter, 150–165. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Harris, John
1993 “The Grammar of Irish English”. In James Milroy, and Leslie Milroy, eds. Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. London: Longman, 139–186.Google Scholar
Hedevind, Bertil
1967 The Dialect of Dentdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Uppsala: University of Uppsala.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond
2007 Irish English. History and Present-Day Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond and Elaine Vaughan
2017 “Introduction”. World Englishes 36: 154–160. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, Martin
2013 Constructional Change in English: Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jansen, Sandra
2014 “Salience Effects in the North-West of England”. Linguistik Online 66: 91–110.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1954 A Modern English Grammar. Morphology. Copenhagen: George Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Kallen, Jeffrey L.
2013 Irish English. Vol. 2: The Republic of Ireland. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kallen, Jeffery L. and John M. Kirk
2008 ICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide Documentation to accompany the Ireland Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ireland). Belfast, NI: Clo Ollscoil na Banrona, School of English, Queen’s University Belfast.Google Scholar
Kastronic, Laura
2011 “Discourse Like in Quebec English”. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17: 105–114.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul and Ann Williams
2002 “Salience as Explanatory Factor in Language Change: Evidence from Dialect Levelling in Urban England”. In Mari Jones, and Edith Esch, eds. Language Change. The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors. Berlin: De Gruyter, 81–110. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press.Google Scholar
1990 “The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change”. Language Variation and Change 2: 205–254. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Levey, Stephen
2006 “The Sociolinguistic Distribution of Discourse Marker Like ”. Multilingua 25: 413–441. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Luckmann, Kathrin
2009 “The Pragmatic Marker Like in Clause-Final Position: Its Functional and Social Distribution in Irish English”. M.A. Thesis, University of Duisburg-Essen.Google Scholar
Maddeaux, Ruth and Aaron Dinkin
2017 “Is Like Like Like?: Evaluating the Same Variant Across Multiple Variables”. Linguistics Vanguard 3. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam
1994 “Sounds Pretty Ethnic, Eh?: A Pragmatic Particle in New Zealand English”. Language in Society 23: 367–367. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Migge, Bettina
2015 “ Now in the Speech of Newcomers to Ireland”. In Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, eds. Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 390–407. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Jim
2009 “Like and Other Discourse Markers”. In Pam Peters, Peter Collins, and Adam Smith, eds. Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 317–338. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Jim and Regina Weinert
1995 “The Function of Like in Dialogue”. Journal of Pragmatics 23: 365–393. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1998 Spontaneous Spoken Language: Syntax and Discourse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Müller, Simone
2005 Discourse Markers in Native and Non-Native English Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mulder, Jean and Sandra A. Thompson
2008 “The Grammaticization of But as a Final Particle in English Conversation”. In Ritva Laury, ed. Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 179–204. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Neary Sundquist, Colleen
2014 “The Use of Pragmatic Markers Across Proficiency Levels in Second Language Speech”. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 4: 637–663. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nestor, Niamh
2013 “The Positional Distribution of Discourse Like: A Case Study of Young Poles in Ireland”. In David Singleton, Vera Regan, and Ewelina Debaene, eds. Linguistic and Cultural Acquisition in a Migrant Community. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 49–72. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nestor, Niamh, Caitriona Ni Chasaide, and Vera Regan
2012 “Discourse Like and Identity Poles in Ireland”. In Bettina Migge, and Maire Ni Chiosain, eds. New Perspectives on Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 327–354. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nestor, Niamh and Vera Regan
2015 “The Significance of Age and Place of Residence in the Positional Distribution of Discourse Like in L2 Speech”. In Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, eds. Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 408–432. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pichler, Heike
2013 The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schourup, Lawrence C.
1985 Common Discourse Particles in English Conversations “Like”, “Well”, “Y’know”. Garland: New York.Google Scholar
Schweinberger, Martin
2012 “A Variational Approach towards Discourse Marker LIKE in Irish-English”. In Bettina Migge, and Maire Ni Chiosain, eds. New Perspectives on Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 179–202. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 “A Sociolinguistics Analysis of Discourse Marker LIKE in Northern Ireland: A Look Behind the Scenes of Quantitative Reasoning”. In Markus Bieswanger, and Amei Koll-Stobbe, eds. New Approaches to the Analysis of Linguistic Variability. Frankfurt: Lang, 13–39.Google Scholar
2014 “The Discourse Marker LIKE: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Selected Varieties of English”. Ph.D. Dissertation: Universität Hamburg.Google Scholar
2015 “A Comparative Study of the Pragmatic Marker Like in Irish English and in South-Eastern Varieties of British English”. In Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty, and Elaine Vaughan, eds. Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 114–134. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2018 “The Discourse Particle Eh in New Zealand English”. Australian Journal of Linguistics 38: 395–420. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Serrano-Losada, Mario
2015 “Element-Final Like in Irish English: Notes on Its Incidence, Frequency, and Distribution”. In Cristina Suarez-Gomez, and Elena Seoane, eds. Englishes Today: Multiple Varieties, Multiple Perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 9–33.Google Scholar
Sharifian, Farzad and Ian G. Malcolm
2003 “The Pragmatic Marker Like in English Teen Talk: Australian Aboriginal Usage”. Pragmatics and Cognition 11: 327–344. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Muffy E. F.
2002 “Like: The Discourse Particle and Semantics”. Journal of Pragmatics 19: 35–71.Google Scholar
Siemund, Peter, Georg Maier, and Martin Schweinberger
2009 “Towards a More Fine-Grained Analysis of the Areal Distributions of Non-Standard Features of English”. In Esa Pentillä, and Heli Paulasto, eds. Language Contacts Meet English Dialects. Studies in Honour of Markku Filppula. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 19–46.Google Scholar
Stubbe, Maria and Janet Holmes
1995 “You Know, Eh and Other ‘Exasperating Expressions’: An Analysis of Social and Stylistic Variation in the Use of Pragmatic Devices in a Sample of New Zealand English”. Language & Communication 15: 63–88. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt
2005 “Language Users as Creatures of Habit: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Persistence in Spoken English”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1: 113–150. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2006 Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English: A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali
2005 “So who? Like how? Just what? Discourse Markers in the Conversation of Young Canadians”. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1896–1915. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Derek Denis
2010 “The Stuff of Change: General Extenders in Toronto, Canada”. Journal of English Linguistics 38: 335–368. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Underhill, Robert
1988 “Like Is, Like, Focus”. American Speech 63: 234–246. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tulving, Endel and Daniel L. Schacter
1990 “Priming and Human Memory Systems”. Science 247: 301–306. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C.
2013 “A Unified Theory of Stable Variation, Syntactic Optionality, and Syntactic Change”. Paper presented at Diachronic Generative Syntax 15, University of Ottawa.
Walshe, Shane
2017 “The Language of Irish Films”. World Englishes 36: 283–299. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zuur, Alain F., Elena N. Ieno, and Chris S. Elphick
2010 “A Protocol for Data Exploration to Avoid Common Statistical Problems”. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 1: 3–14. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

No author info given
2021.  In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218], Crossref logo
Rüdiger, Sofia
2021.  Like in Korean English speech . World Englishes Crossref logo
Schweinberger, Martin
2021.  In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218], ► pp. 235 ff. Crossref logo
Schweinberger, Martin
2021. Ongoing change in the Australian English amplifier system. Australian Journal of Linguistics 41:2 ► pp. 166 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 03 january 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.