Cover not available
Part of
Pragmatic Markers in Irish English
Edited by Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty and Elaine Vaughan
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 258] 2015
► pp. 114–134

A comparative study of the pragmatic marker like in Irish English and in south-eastern varieties of British English

This study compares the use of like in Irish English (IrE) to its use in southeastern British English (SE-BrE). There are significant differences between the use of like in IrE and SE-BrE in terms of overall frequency, social meaning and positioning. This paper argues that the differences in the use of like require a functional explanation on two levels, namely on a language-external social level and on a language-internal discourse-pragmatic level. On the extra-linguistic level, the differences in like’s social profile indicate distinct social meanings while, on a language-internal level, differences in positioning suggest that either like is used to perform distinct pragmatic functions or that uses of like in clause-medial and clause-final positions compete to perform similar functions, e.g. focusing elements. The substantial differences revealed by the analysis are accounted for by historical and identity-related factors.

Published online: 15 July 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.258.05sch
References
Amador-Moreno, Carolina P
2010 “How Can Corpora Be Used To Explore Literary Speech Representation?” In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Anne O’Keeffe and Michael McCarthy, 531–544. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle 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 Corpus-Based Studies in English, ed. by Magnus Ljung, 37–48. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
1998 “The Pragmatic Marker Like From a Relevance-Theoretic Perspective.” In Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker and Yael Ziv, 147–170. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderwald, Lieselotte
2004 “English in the Southeast of England: Morphology and Syntax.” In A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 2: Morphology and Syntax, ed. by Bernd Kortmann, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, Edgar W. Schneider, and Clive Upton, 175-195. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle
2001 “An Alternative View of Like: Its Grammaticalisation in Conversational American English and Beyond.” Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 11: 21–41.Google Scholar
Columbus, Georgie
2009 “Irish Like as an Invariant Tag: Evidence from ICE-Ireland.” Paper presented at AACL 2009 (American Association for Corpus Linguistics), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 9 October 2009.
Croucher, Stephen M
2004 “I Uh Know What Like You Are Saying: An Analysis of Discourse Markers in Limited Preparation Events.” National Forensics Journal 41 (4): 38–52.Google Scholar
Dailey-O’Cain, Jennifer
2000 “The Sociolinguistic Distribution of and Subjective Attitudes Toward Focuser Like and Quotative Like .” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (1): 60–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
D’Arcy, Alexandra
2005 LIKE. “Syntax and Development.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto.
2007 “LIKE and Language Ideology: Disentangling the Fact from Fiction.” American Speech 82 (4): 386–419. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “Canadian English as a Window to the Rise of ‘Like’ in Discourse.” Anglistik (International Journal of English Studies) 19 (2): 125–140.Google Scholar
Harris, John
1993 “The Grammar of Irish English.” In Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles, ed. by James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, 139–186. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Hedevind, Bertil
1967 The Dialect of Dentdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Uppsala: Upsala Universitet.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond
2007 Irish English. History and Present-Day Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kallen, Jeffrey L
2006 “Arrah, Like, You Know: The Dynamics of Discourse Marking in ICE-Ireland.” Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 16 , University of Limerick, 6–8 July 2006. [URL], accessed 07.12.2013.
Kallen, Jeffery L., and John M. Kirk
2008 ICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, Edgar W. Schneider, and Clive Upton
(eds.) 2004 A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, Volume 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, and Kerstin Lunkenheimer
(eds.) 2011 The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [URL], accessed 07.12.2013.Google Scholar
Levey, Stephen
2006 “The Sociolinguistic Distribution of Discourse Marker Like in Preadolescent Speech.” Multilingua 25 (4): 413–444. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Jim
2009 “ Like and Other Discourse Markers.” In Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and Beyond, ed. by Pam Peters, Peter Collins and Adam Smith, 317–338. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Jim, and Regina Weinert
1995 “The Function of Like in Dialogue.” Journal of Pragmatics 23 (4): 365–393. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schourup, Lawrence C
1983 Common Discourse Particles in English Conversation. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University.
Schweinberger, Martin
2011 The Discourse Marker LIKE. A Corpus-Based Analysis of Selected Varieties of English. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hamburg.
2012 “LIKE in Irish English.” In New Perspectives on Irish English, ed. by Bettina Migge and Máire Ní Chiosáin, 179–201. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Muffy E.F
2002 “ Like: The Discourse Particle and Semantics.” Journal of Semantics 19 (1): 35–71. DOI logoGoogle 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 Language Contacts Meet English Dialects. Studies in Honour of Markku Filppula, ed. by Esa Pentillä and Heli Paulasto, 19–46. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali
2005 “So Who? Like How? Just What? Discourse Markers in the Conversation of Young Canadians.” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (11): 1896–1915. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tristram, Hildegard
(ed) 1997 The Celtic Englishes I. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
(ed) 2000 The Celtic Englishes II. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
(ed.) 2003 The Celtic Englishes III. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
(ed) 2006 The Celtic Englishes IV. Potsdam: Potsdam University Press.Google Scholar
Underhill, Robert
1988 “Like Is, Like, Focus”, American Speech 63 (3): 234–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 17 other publications

Corrigan, Karen P. & Chloé Diskin
2020. ‘Northmen, Southmen, comrades all’? The adoption of discourselikeby migrants north and south of the Irish border. Language in Society 49:5 ► pp. 745 ff. DOI logo
Diskin‐Holdaway, Chloé
2021.  You know and like among migrants in Ireland and Australia . World Englishes DOI logo
Hancil, Sylvie
2021. Chapter 8. The final particle like in Northern English. In Studies at the Grammar-Discourse Interface [Studies in Language Companion Series, 219], ► pp. 230 ff. DOI logo
Kirk, John M.
2016. The Pragmatic Annotation Scheme of the SPICE-Ireland Corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21:3 ► pp. 299 ff. DOI logo
KIRK, JOHN M.
2017. Developments in the spoken component of ICE corpora. World Englishes 36:3 ► pp. 371 ff. DOI logo
Leuckert, Sven & Sofia Rüdiger
2021. Discourse markers and world Englishes. World Englishes DOI logo
Lewis, Diana M.
2018. Grammaticalizing connectives in English and discourse information structure. In New Trends in Grammaticalization and Language Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 202], ► pp. 135 ff. DOI logo
Magliacane, Annarita
2020. Erasmus students in an Irish studyabroad context. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education 5:1 ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
O’Keeffe, Anne
2023. Irish English Corpus Linguistics. In The Oxford Handbook of Irish English, ► pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
P. Amador-Moreno, Carolina
2023. Discourse-Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. In The Oxford Handbook of Irish English, ► pp. 426 ff. DOI logo
Sato, Eriko
2019. A translation-based heterolingual pun and translanguaging. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 31:3 ► pp. 444 ff. DOI logo
Schweinberger, Martin
2020. Speech-unit final like in Irish English. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 41:1 ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
Schweinberger, Martin
2023. On the L1-acquisition of the pragmatics of discourse like . Functions of Language 30:3 ► pp. 255 ff. DOI logo
Strange, Louis
2023. Irish English and national identity in the linguistic landscape of Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2023:284 ► pp. 167 ff. DOI logo
Taguchi, Naoko & Marcella Caprario
2023. L2 Pragmatics Research and the Problem of L1 Norms. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
VAUGHAN, ELAINE, MICHAEL MCCARTHY & BRIAN CLANCY
2017. Vague category markers as turn‐final items in Irish English. World Englishes 36:2 ► pp. 208 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. The Sociophonetics of Dublin English [Studies in Language Variation, 30], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 april 2024. 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.