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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 aim of this paper is to show that the use of texts written in non-standard varieties of English, such as Irish English (or Hiberno-English), could be a valuable complement to language teaching and language learning. The paper concentrates on a number of linguistic features which are characteristic of this variety of English and which appear in the works of Irish writers. Special attention is paid to the work of Donegal author Patrick MacGill, and excerpts from his early novels are used as an example of Irish English writing.

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.

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.

This paper analyses in quantitative and qualitative terms the representation of the discourse marker like in contemporary Irish English writing. A common feature of contemporary spoken English, the discourse marker like seems to have made its way into the English spoken in Ireland, as portrayed by contemporary Irish authors such as Paul Howard. Howard, whose narrative can be taken as an example of oral writing, has been acclaimed by critics as having an exceptionally fine ear for Dublin English, but what is this acclamation based on? The paper argues that the findings of corpus stylistics (comparative frequencies, distributions, etc.) document in a more systematic way what literary critics and readers may intuitively deduce. By analysing the syntactic and pragmatic behaviour of like in Howard’s fictional discourse, this paper aims to show the value of the combination of computer methodology and literary interpretation in evaluating the representation of fictional dialect.

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