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Pragmatic Markers in Irish English
Edited by Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty and Elaine Vaughan
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 258] 2015
► pp. 229–247

“Hurry up baby son all the boys is finished their breakfast”

Examining the use of vocatives as pragmatic markers in Irish Traveller and settled family discourse

The data for this chapter comprises two corpora representing the intimate genre collected in the home/family environment: one from a middle class Irish family and one from a family belonging to the Irish Traveller community, an ethnic minority group accounting for less than 1% of the Irish population. The focus of the chapter is the occurrence of vocatives across the two corpora. The corpus frequency counts suggest that although the Traveller family use vocatives notably more frequently than the settled family, vocatives play a defining role in both families’ pragmatic systems. In general, vocatives in spoken English are associated with the marking of discourse boundaries (see, for example, Carter and McCarthy 2006). However, this chapter demonstrates that vocatives perform a predominantly mitigating function in both families.

Published online: 15 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.258.10cla
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