Irish English features in the ICE-Ireland corpus

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Regensburg, language: English, abstract: It can be suggested that the distinctive features of Irish English stem from, basically, three major sources: (1) Archaic (British) English input, (2) transfer and contact from Irish and Scottish and (3) independent developments (see below). Surely, colloquial usage shows clear traces of these three sources. Therefore, the question asked in this paper is whether or not this distinctive character, which is reflected in colloquial usage, can also be observed in Standard Irish English or if basically, Standard Irish English equals Standard British English. Thus, several selected features which are traditionally ascribed to Irish English will be presented. These features will then be examined with respect to their frequency, usage and distribution in Standard Irish English. "Distribution" refers to both the occurrence in certain discourse types and registers (written/spoken, formal/informal), but also the proportioning of features in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Afterwards, the results will be compared with British English standard usage. For this purpose, the Irish (divided into Northern Ireland/ ICE-NI and the Republic of Ireland/ICE-ROI) and the British component of the International Corpus of English will be used.