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The reader that Spanish novelists Javier Marías and Antonio Muñoz Molina have in mind in Todas las Almas, Corazón tan blanco and Carlota Fainberg is not only an educated reader , but also a reader who is presumed to be pro-ficient in English, and who will, therefore, be able to comprehend the numerous examples of code-switching, the “philological dissections” and cultural references to the English-speaking world that appear in their respective novels. This paper shows how these two authors create fictional images of linguistic interference and translation in order to add credibility to both their characters and narrators. It also addresses the question of whether or not, while still writing from an une quivocally Spanish perspective, they manage to successfully integrate (both in aesthetic terms and in terms of mimetic accuracy) elements pertaining to the English-speaking world into their novels, endowing them with an intercultural dimension.

The be + after + V-ing construction is probably the signature construction of Irish English. It has often been used in the portrayal of Irish characters in literature, theatre and cinema. This structure has been widely researched from many different perspectives. Its main function has been described as reporting the conclusion of an action by way of reference to a state initiated by the conclusion of this action. It is also associated with the delivery of ‘hot news.’ Though this Irish (Gaelic)-influenced structure has sometimes been dismissed as stage Irish and outmoded, it is still widely used in contemporary spoken interactions. This paper analyses its use in over 100 hours of naturally occurring casual conversations from around Ireland from the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE), and these are then compared with a smaller corpus of written Irish English which includes literary sources.

Among prescriptivists, the Irish have long had a reputation for not following the rule requiring a distinction betweenshallwith first-person andwillwith other grammatical subjects. Recent shift towardswillwith all persons in North American English – now also affecting British English – has been attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. The present study of data from theCorpus of Irish English Correspondence(CORIECOR) finds that Irish English has not always preferredwill. Rather, the present-day situation emerged in Irish English between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. This important period covers the main language shift from Irish to English, and simplification in the acquisition process may account for the Irish English use ofwill.In eighteenth-century Irish English,shallpredominated. Comparison with other colonial Englishes of the period – US English (Kytö 1991) and Canadian English (Dollinger 2008) – and with north-west British English (Dollinger 2008) shows broadly similar cross-varietal distributions of first-personshallandwill. Irish English shifted rapidly towardswillby the 1880s, but was not unusual in this respect; a similar development took place at the same time in Canadian English, which may indicate a more general trend, at least in colonial Englishes. It is thus doubtful that Irish English influence drove the change towards first-personwill.We suggest the change might be associated with increasing literacy and accompanying colloquialisation (Mair 1997; Biber 2003; Leechet al.2009: 239ff.). As Rissanen (1999: 212) observes, and Dollinger corroborates for north-west British English,willpersisted in regional Englishes after the rise of first-personshallin the standard language. Increased use ofwillmight have been an outcome of wider literacy leading to more written texts, like letters, being produced by members of lower social strata, whose more nonstandard/vernacular usage was thus recorded in writing. There are currently few regional letter corpora for testing this hypothesis more widely. However, we suggest that, in nineteenth-century Ireland, increasing literacy may have helped spread first-personwillas a change from below. The shift to first-personwillthat is apparent in CORIECOR would then result from greater lower-class literacy, and this might be a key to understanding this change in other Englishes too.

One of the main challenges faced by Irish emigrants was the negotiation of diasporic identities and new community forms. This paper sets out to explore the notions of gender and the conceptualization of Irishness in post-famine emigrants’ personal correspondence (1880–1930). Specifically, the study proposes an in-depth analysis of identity nouns such as home and country in order to elucidate the various ways in which the concepts of identity and mobility are interpreted and constructed within male and female discourses. The data for this chapter come from CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty K, Amador-Moreno CP. In preparation. CORIECOR. The corpus of Irish English correspondence. University of Bergen and University of Extremadura, Bergen and Caceres). This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociolinguistics (Chamber JK, Sociolinguistic theory. Revised edition. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, 2009) and corpus pragmatics (Romero-Trillo J, (ed), Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2008; The yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2013: new domains and methodologies. Springer, Dordrecht: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3, 2013; The yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2014: new empirical and theoretical paradigms. Springer, Dordrecht). Methodologically, our study relies on corpus linguistics techniques, namely keyness analysis and concordance lines, to identify the most common collocations and contextual uses of the nouns under study. In the second part of the analysis, the emotional load of these terms is examined from a sociopragmatic perspective in order to explain the way in which letter writers exploit language “to generate particular meanings, to take up particular social positioning” (Culpeper J, Historical sociopragmatics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. 135 pp, 2011:2).

There has been considerable recent investment in the digitization of databases, like the Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration (DIPPAM) project, that relate in various ways to the history and Diaspora of Ireland, which has been an area of intensive scholarship since the later twentieth century (see, for example, Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; O’Sullivan, The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, Vols. 1–6. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Miller, Ireland and Irish America. Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration. Dublin: Field Day Files, 2008). As such resources were largely designed for academics in historical studies and allied disciplines, their applicability as tools to engage public audiences (particularly in the education and heritage sectors) remains to be tested. In this chapter, we discuss how databases like these can be created and subsequently exploited for a much wider variety of academic and non-academic uses by focusing on two related digital initiatives, namely, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) project currently being undertaken at the University of Bergen and Coventry University’s Digitising Experiences of Migration: The Development of Interconnected Letter Collections (DEM) project.

The concept of ‘perceptual dialectology’ is defined by Preston (1999: xxv) as a sub-branch of folk linguistics that represents the interest in language use by dialectologists, sociolinguists and variationists. This area of investigation is particularly concerned with what non-specialists have to say about variation: ‘Where do they believe it comes from? Where do they believe it exists? What do they believe is its function?’ One of the principal techniques developed for perceptual dialectology in the 1980s included, for example, drawing boundaries on a blank map around areas where the respondents thought regional speech zones existed (Preston and Howe 1987), a method also employed by Hickey (2005: 99–105) in the context of Irish English, in order to test what conceptions of dialect areas non-specialist speakers had for Ireland. In Hickey’s survey, the majority of the Dublin respondents distinguished between two forms of Dublin English: a northern, more vernacular form, and a southern form, which they referred to in the map returns as Dublin 4 (or D4). Such a division was also recognised by 39 per cent of the non-Dublin respondents. This distinction, together with prescriptive comments such as ‘strong’ or ‘hard’ to describe the north Dublin accent, or ‘posh’, ‘snobbish’, ‘phoney’ to refer to the Southside/Dublin 4 accent, is a good barometer with which to measure non-specialists’ beliefs and attitudes towards the English spoken in Dublin.

Professor T. P. Dolan is a lexicographer and regular contributor to programs on Irish radio and television, who has made the term Hiberno-English widely known in Irish society. He has thus been hugely influential in making the Irish more aware of the features that make their English different from other Englishes. Hiberno-English is nowadays very much a sign of identity for many, a form of English that sets the Irish apart from other native speakers of English. Professor Dolan is also the director of www.hiberno-english.com, which is, as he describes it 'a living museum' or 'living laboratory of HE vocabulary and syntax', where people from all over the world can log questions about the English of Ireland. T. P. Dolan, profesor, lexicografo y colaborador habitual en diferentes programas de radio y television, ha conseguido dar a conocer el termino "Hiberno-ingles" a una gran parte de la sociedad irlandesa. Gracias a el, en parte, los irlandeses son mas conscientes de las caracteristicas que hacen que el ingles que hablan sea diferente de otras variedades. El hiberno-ingles es en la actualidad un signo de identidad para muchos, una forma de expresion que diferencia a la irlandesa de otras culturas anglo-parlantes. El profesor Dolan dirige tambien la pagina web www.hiberno-english.com, 'un museo viviente', o 'un laboratorio de vocabulario y sintaxis hiberno-inglesa', como el mismo lo describe, en el que cualquiera puede enviar preguntas sobre el ingles que se habla en Irlanda. It is a great pleasure to sit down and talk to someone with whom I share similar research interests. I suppose we should start by defining what Hiberno-English is. What is Hiberno-English? Is it the same as IrE? Hiberno-English (HE) is the technical term for the Irish use of English. It is a term used, first of all, in the early nineteenth century by the poet Tennyson, and it's been in use ever since then, by very distinguished authors, writers and scholars such as Seamus Heaney (he uses it in his introduction to his great translation of Beowulf). The term Irish English is a misnomer, because it works on the principle that 'Irish English' is similar to Australian English, American English or Canadian English, which it isn't. English was transported to these countries, but did not mix with the a the native languages. In Ireland, Hiberno-English means that you have two languages in kind of unruly shotgun marriage together, fighting all the time over the centuries, for syntax, pronunciation, vocabulary, idiom. 'Hiberno-English', therefore, exactly symbolises this very healthy connexion between the two disparate and independent languages. So, for you, Hiberno-English is more a contact vernacular than a colonial variety of English ... Yes, it is. It's two languages in contact, two languages in equal contact as both have very, very strong backgrounds, both have powerful grammars, and both have very powerful literatures as well, so both have the prestige of being independent languages. In other countries, this is not the case. English never had to fight another language. In comparison with all of those other varieties of English, what is different about the English spoken in Ireland? First of all, the pronunciation is quite different, because it retains the pronunciation of the English language in its earlier forms, for example, meat is pronounced like mate Very many of the older pronunciations of English are retained in HE, but much more important, we find English consonant and vowels removed and replaced by Irish vowels and consonants, so 'th' in the word thought is often pronounced as [t], thus making it sound like taught. There are many other examples, initial 's' in stairs is sometimes pronounced as 'sh', film is pronounced as fillum. The grammar is particularly different; we say in HE things such as "I'm after having my dinner", "Is it there that you're going?", "He came in and I writing my letter", all of which are based on the grammar of the Irish language. …

This chapter investigates the question of whether response items in Spanish can be analysed using frameworks developed for the study of similar items in English. Data comes from the Spanish corpus COREC, the Corpus Oral de Referencia del Espanol Contemporaneo, and is compared where appropriate with data from the British English corpus, CANCODE, the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English. The main motivation behind this chapter is to assess the possibility and appropriateness of using English-based frameworks for the analysis of Spanish and to further the notion of ‘good listenership’. To this end, the study scopes out (a) formal aspects of response items in Spanish, (b) pragmatic coverage of the items and their translatability and transferability, and (c) insights into potential cross-cultural misunderstandings with English as the comparison language. We conclude that there is a good but not complete match between English and Spanish, that response tokens are an essential element in being an active and engaged listener in conversation in any language and that fluency is a process best understood in the context of dialogue.

peer-reviewed While language teacher education programmes and language syllabi in secondary education encourage the use of the target language in the classroom, resources to support teachers in this endeavour, such as books with useful phrases, do not state that the examples they provide are corpus-based, i.e. drawn from actual language use rather than invented phrases. This paper investigates whether consultation of a corpus of classroom discourse can be of benefit in language teacher education. The paper describes a project involving the creation of corpora of classroom discourse in French and Spanish, and the use of these corpora with student teachers. After setting the research in the context of corpora and classroom interaction, it examines issues such as the content of the corpora, the type of consultation (direct or mediated by the teacher), and the student teachers’ evaluation of the activity. Special attention is paid to one particular aspect of classroom interaction, discourse markers. PUBLISHED peer-reviewed