Speech-unit finallikein Irish English

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates the use of speech-unit finallike(SUFlike) in standard Irish English (IrE) and takes a variationist approach based on the Irish component of theInternational 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 SUFlikein that it applies the principle of accountability and shows that priming significantly facilitates SUFlikeuse, that SUFlikehas increased between an earlier (1990–1994) and a later phase (2002–2005) of data collection and that, between 2002 and 2005, SUFlikeuse correlates negatively with audience size but not so in data collected between 1990 and 1994. The relative absence of significant social stratification of SUFlikeuse suggests that SUFlikecontinues to be a frequent feature of standard IrE and substantiates that it is a linguistic marker of Irish identity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.