Sociolinguistic Information and Irish English Corpora

  • Elaine Vaughan
  • Brian Clancy
Chapter

Abstract

The central part of this chapter presents the sort of sociolinguistic information that is retrievable from some corpora of Irish English (IrE) that currently exist. However, in order to fully explore and contextualise the research possibilities that corpora of IrE offer the sociolinguist, we probe the relationship — emergent, developing or with the potential to develop — between the core concerns of sociolinguistic research and contemporary corpus linguistics. Hence, the nature of language corpora and the fundamental aspects of the sort of analytical tools commonly used to mine them become relevant. An emergent consensus in most recent work on corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics (e.g. Friginal and Hardy 2014) is to take the view that as a methodological approach, corpus linguistics has much to offer sociolinguistics (and vice versa, though this is not as frequently discussed, see Kendall 2011). For the purpose of the present chapter, corpus linguistics is understood to be both an independent field of linguistic enquiry and a principled methodological approach to the analysis of linguistic data, one that is in the process of developing a strong, mutually beneficial research relationship with sociolinguistics, as evidenced in recent book-length treatments (e.g. Baker 2010, or Friginal and Hardy 2014).

Keywords

John Benjamin Discourse Marker Frequency List British National Corpus Language Corpus 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Elaine Vaughan and Brian Clancy 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Elaine Vaughan
  • Brian Clancy

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