This is a pre‐print and does not represent the final version. For page references please check the published version: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137453464 The sociolinguistics of Irish writing in English Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Universidad de Extremadura 1. Introduction 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 nonspecialists 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 employed by Hickey (2005: 99-105) in the context of Irish English, in order to test what conceptions of dialect areas nonspecialist 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% 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’, ‘phoncy’ to refer to the southside/Dublin 4 accent, is a good barometer with which to measure nonspecialists’ beliefs and attitudes towards the English spoken in Dublin. The aim of this chapter is to discuss how nonspecialised perceptions of Dublin English can be employed in order to signal current language use, as well as class, and gender differences. Nonspecialists in this context refers to speakers who have had no formal linguistic training, and it includes those who may show a certain degree of linguistic awareness in their perception of language use. Fiction writers who use dialogue as a tool to imbue their stories with realism also fall into that category. Many authors, as is well known, employ linguistic features that characterise natural conversation, including those who write memoirs, biographies, and even standard nonfiction, because these features help them illustrate rather than just describe what they want to say. The type of information that can be gleaned from the use of dialogue, as I have argued elsewhere (Amador-Moreno 2010b, 2012: 22; Amador-Moreno & McCafferty 2015), helps authors construct characters without having to resort to descriptions. However, much of what is selected by fiction writers as representative of a particular type/group of speaker(s) is inevitably influenced by subjective factors: it reflects the author’s own perception of how others speak. In such domains, representational practices can arise and become 2 Index traditions (Hickey 2010: 14), both in the context of fiction and in the general public psyche, and stereotypes can become perpetuated. In the process of enregisterment, defined by Agha as that ‘through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (2003: 231), literary works are among the most influential elements that contribute to the systematic and structured use of what could be considered a linguistic shibboleth. In the Irish context, for example, the creation of the stereotypical figure of the Stage Irishman has often been based on linguistic characterization through time (see Hickey 2007: 297-301, Walshe 2009: 5-14, Amador-Moreno 2010a: 89109). In this sense, when examining the way authors represent dialects, it seems pertinent to consider what sort of sociohistorical (or other non-linguistic) factors influence perception. Does fiction writing contribute to the creation of certain linguistic trends that may end up being associated with specific speech communities? Does the fact that certain authors show an interest in replicating real spoken discourse in their work influence readers’ perception of how a particular speech community speaks? Or is the author’s own perception of language use just a convenient tool that allows him/her to connect with readers? Reader/spectator/viewer identification clearly plays an important role in the success of a novel, a play, a film or a television programme. And, as Quaglio (2009: 13) puts it, ‘it is through language that this identification is achieved and popular culture is expressed and reflected’. This chapter discusses how the perception that fiction writers have of a particular dialect plays a key role in the process of enregisterement, a useful framework developed by Agha (2003) that combines various linguistic theories to describe how a set of linguistic features that start to be perceived as markers of socio-economic class, can end up being linked to place and enregistered as a dialect. One of the questions I ask is whether one set of linguistic forms could potentially be imported from another variety of English and become enregistered as a different variety through written fiction. In the present study I focus on one author, Paul Howard, and discuss how his depiction of the English spoken in Dublin is an important tool in the construction of the fictionalised identity of his characters. In his Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, where the narrative style is built as an emulation of orality, the use of linguistic features such as quotatives, conforms with the overall stylistic strategy employed by Howard in constructing the protagonist’s narrative voice. In the sections that follow, I start by describing the value of the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly dataset for linguistic analysis, in section 3 I explain why the analysis of quotatives is worth investigating; section 4 discusses some issues in relation to how quotative forms are used in the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress and their significance; and finally, section 5 presents some concluding remarks. 2. A Dubliner’s voice in fiction Paul Howard, a Dubliner himself, and therefore, an insider in terms of awareness (Melchers 2010: 91-92; Wales 2010: 67-68), is a well established writer in Ireland. His career as a fiction writer started with the creation of the character of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, a satirical representation of a wealthy, chauvinistic young Index 3 Dubliner in his twenties, from the south side of the city, who came to life originally as part of a weekly column in the Irish Sunday Tribune in 1998 and whose ‘adventures’ are published to date in the same column format in The Irish Times. The column gave rise to a series of fourteen novels, three plays and other Rossrelated comedy writing. The novels display a type of humorous narrative that can be considered as the male variant of Chick Lit1, and has in common with its female-oriented counterpart2 a confessional style derived from the fact that the story is presented as the oral narrative of the protagonist, Ross (O’Carroll-Kelly), ‘as told to Paul Howard’. As Gorman (2013: 8) states, ‘[t]he format [of the series] is set out as a written text derived from an oral communication; therefore what is presented to the reader is an interlacing of speech/writing’, a transcript of naturally occurring speech, which is what makes it interesting for the present study. This recording of speech in writing presents us with a type of narrative that is constructed as spontaneous discourse, crafting the impression that the protagonist is speaking directly to the reader (Ferris and Young 2006: 4). This technique, where the reader is treated as someone who is there to ‘listen’ to the story, purposely looks for an immediate connection with the reader, and such connection is further sought through an effective representation of dialect, which is the result of Howard’s acute (though non-specialised) linguistic awareness. Much of the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly comedy value derives from Howard’s style and ability to capture the spontaneity of spoken Dublin English, which also explain, in part, how he has managed to take, as critic Dan Sheehan points out, ‘what should have been a small-scale parody with a rapidly approaching sell-by date and turned it into one of the most enduring satirical figures in the Irish literary canon’3. Through the character of Ross, Howard provides the reader with the recorded speech patterns that characterise wealthy south Dublin society that is the aim of his satire. In his attempt to capture the social class-based idiolect of this area of Dublin, Howard resorts, among other things, to eye dialect, as some literary critics have observed: Howard’s dialogue sings, and he never misses the chance to subvert standard English in service of a larf. In Ross’s parlance, cars are cors, guys are goys, body parts are body ports. Again and again the reader is compelled to wonder how the kind of airhead babble lampooned by Frank Zappa in Valley Girl 30 years ago came to be the official language of the Dundrum4 generation. 1 As I have pointed out elsewhere (Amador-Moreno, forthcoming), this genre is sometimes referred to as Lad Lit, Dick Lit, or Cappuccino Fiction (Montoro 2012). 2 An example of which in the Irish context would be Marian Keyes’s writing. 3 Dan Sheehan, ‘Roysh on the money’, in The Irish Times (Sat. 9 October 2010), [Weekend Review], p.10. Another critic, Patrick Freyne, also refers to Howard’s place in Irish culture: ‘A bit of an institution now in his own right, O’Carroll-Kelly is one of a pantheon of anthropomorphic Irelands (others include Cuchulain, Kathleen Ní Houlihan, Dev and Marty Whelan). It’s hard to imagine the place without him, and I believe that, in years to come, heavily footnoted editions of Paul Howard’s long-running series will be the textbooks on early 21st-century Ireland’. (‘It’s Good to Know We Can Rely on Ross’, review of The Shelbourne Ultimatum, by Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, in The Irish Times (13 Oct. 2012): Weekend [“Arts & Books”]). 4 Dundrum is the name of a suburb in the south side of Dublin. 4 Index Ross’s employment of the dreaded ascending line statement – whereby every other declaration is capped with a question mark, the legacy of too many hours watching Friends – and liberal pepperings of like would be intolerable in a so-called serious novel, but here, as send-up, it never gets old5. Certain uses of the discourse marker like in the narrative presented by Ross do indeed sound like an importation from American English (Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009) that has been appropriated by a very specific type of speaker in (the south side of) Dublin, to such an extent that authors like Howard employ it to characterise this type of speaker. Whether this is an illustration of the influence of spoken media on processes of language and dialect change or simply a case of a short-lived linguistic innovation that has been captured by Howard is something that would require further investigation: a balanced exploration of media engagement and media influence on the speech of young Dubliners would require the combination of speech data (fictional and non-fictional) with participant observation, as well as interviews and questionnaires6, but it is something worth considering. The satirisation of prosperous south-side Dublin runs beside Howard’s depiction of the more working-class and less prestigious north-side Dublin, both of which are represented through very specific linguistic features. Whereas Ross and his friends incarnate what Hickey (2005: 7-8) refers to as ‘new Dublin English’, other characters from the north side use ‘local Dublin English’. The north-south divide that is represented in the novels is based on the linguistic differentiation between speakers generally coming from areas of high social prestige – those representing ‘a section of the population which does not want to be identified with all too localised forms of Dublin English’, and those who ‘show strongest identification with traditional conservative Dublin life of which the popular accent is very much a part’ (Hickey 2005: 6–7). The following excerpt from the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress (2005) illustrates this linguistic differentiation [Tina and her son Ronan, who is also Ross’s illegitimate son, are two characters from the north side of Dublin]: I don’t know what it is, roysh, but I can’t stop thinking about Ronan. It’s probably the whole father–son thing, blah blah blah, but I wake up in some bird’s house in Booterstown this particular Sunday morning, roysh, and I bell Tina and ask her if it’d be okay to, like, call out to the gaff. She goes, ‘Jaysus, you’re not scared of out-staying your welcome, you, are ye?’ and I’m there, ‘Oh, but I just thought …’ and she’s like, ‘I’m only messin’ wi’ ye, Ross. Ronan tinks de wurdled of ye. Come on out for yisser breakfast.’ Apart from colloquial lexical items such as bird, bell or gaff, and the attempted 5 Peter Murphy. There’s life in the old Rosser yet: Keeping up with the Kalashnikovs. The Irish Times, 27 Sept. 2014. 6 For an interesting discussion of media influence on the spread of linguistic innovations like quotative be + like see Sayers (2014). A comparison of speech data from the UK and the US is also given by Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005), who analyse the representation of linguistic innovation (e.g. intensifiers very, and so) in Friends. See also Quaglio (2010) for a study comparing the language of Friends to natural conversation. Index 5 phonetic rendering of words such as roysh (right), tinks (thinks), or wurdled (world), two other features call our attention as readers: the use of quotatives she goes, I’m there, and she’s like on the one hand, and the insertion of like in midposition in ‘it’d be okay to, like, call out to the gaff’, on the other, which, as the review quoted above points out, sounds like a line taken from the sitcom Friends. Despite the fictional differences between the world recreated in Friends and in the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly [RO’CK] series, one of the things that the characters in the American sitcom and the Irish book saga may have in common is precisely the use of certain linguistic traits such as like as a discourse marker, and of be + like, be + there, and go as quotatives. Given that both settings try to recreate the effect of face-to-face interaction, the recurrence of linguistic features such as discourse markers and quotatives, that characterise natural conversation and contribute towards rapport building with the listener/reader, is to be expected. The use of quotative forms such as be + like, be + there, and go form part of the linguistic repertoire of the south-siders depicted in the RO’CK series. They are used for dramatization, to frame direct quotations, as in the following excerpt: Emer turns around to me and goes, ‘Oh my God, I heard JP’s totally flipped out,’ and I’m there, ‘What do you mean, flipped out? He’s just gone mad into God,’ and then Chloë goes, ‘Oh, yeah, like he needs to be praying? He’s loaded, Ross,’ and Emer’s there, ‘Yeah, I heard he’s had a total breakdown. It’s like, Oh! My! God!’ and Chloë’s like, ‘I heard that, too. I heard it was like, Aaahhh. And I heard that from Wendy, who’s, like, in the Institute with a girl who lives two doors down from his parents.’ In trying to create that effect of orality whereby Ross’s storytelling positions the reader as listener, stories are dramatised by mimicking the characters in the narrative (in this case Emer, Chloë and himself). In previous work (AmadorMoreno 2012, forthcoming) I have argued that in naturally-occurring spoken discourse, action-oriented narration generally calls for reported speech (Barbieri, 2005: 231), and direct quotation is a common form of what Labov (1972) called internal evaluation. By putting words in the mouth of the characters, the teller communicates what happened from inside the story (Tannen 1982: 8), making it sound more dramatic. In the context of narratives, quotatives are employed as a strategy to build on interpersonal involvement or to create a sense of identification. The use of quotatives allows the narrator to replay the speaker’s reaction, as in face-to-face spontaneous conversation, and their use contributes to creating the effect of focus on interpersonal or emotional involvement, which is often foregrounded in real spoken narrative by oral features such as these. As was indicated above, the novel is presented to the reader as if a dialogue between Ross and the reader-as-listener had in fact been established from the outset, where the character-narrator, manages to ‘create the illusion of a sense of closeness with their readership because [he] appear[s] to be conveying [his] message directly’ (Montoro 2010: 131). The incorporation of quotatives into the narrative, thus, creates that sense of intimacy that exists in conversations between friends, shortening the distance between speaker and listener (and between narrator and reader in this case). The use of be + like, be + there, and go contributes to constructing the 6 Index narration in a convincing fashion. In that sense, it could be argued that these features are an important part of the strategy deliberately employed by Howard to build rapport with the reader, who is able to recognise these speech features as characteristic of current spoken Dublin English (in some cases because they have actually witnessed similar scenarios occurring in real life). The data to be analysed in what follows comes from the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress (2005) (henceforth referred to as CIDN), which contains 91,839 words in total. This novel is representative of the style employed by its author7, and a corpus-analytic exploration of it provides interesting insights into how the narrative voice is constructed based on real spoken features of contemporary IrE. In Amador-Moreno (fortcoming) I discuss how this construction may in fact affect the reader’s evaluation of its effects, once certain recurrent forms such as discourse markers and quotatives are taken into account. In the present chapter I concentrate on the indexical meaning of the quotative forms that appear in the novel in order to assess how the choice of language or language varieties, linguistic features and language patterns may be revealing in terms of signaling ingroup membership when relating narratives. I also argue that Howard’s conscious decision to incorporate quotative forms into the novel and make them so salient is a clear indication of their existence in present-day Dublin English. His choice of linguistic features is not only a reflection of his reliability as an observer of contemporary Dublin speech, but also a sign of his strong interest in portraying his characters in a socially and linguistically realistic way through narration. Woven into the story of CIDN is Howard’s concern with the display of sociolinguistic identities and attitudes towards contemporary Dublin English. 3. Why look at quotatives? In the text surveyed here there is clear evidence of authorial sensitivity to highfrequency uses of quotative forms in real spoken Dublin English. A corpus-driven analysis of the novel reveals (Amador-Moreno 2012, forthcoming) that such frequency is replicated in Howard’s writing in order to breathe realism into the story. And, although the recurrence of features like these may simply be a way of overgeneralising or exaggerating certain linguistic patterns for comic, thematic, and even political purposes, as is often the case in writing (Ellis 1994: 139-140), in the context that this chapter focuses on, a corpus study of the novel shows how the repetition of certain patterns may carry a specific indexical meaning. Repetition of patterns in the form of clusters, or lexical bundles, as argued by Biber et al. (1999), are an important overall component of the representation of speech in a novel. 7 As I have pointed out in other work using this data, it is not the purpose of this chapter to validate the entire literary/fictional dialect of Paul Howard. Instead, its main purpose is to investigate quotatives in one novel, which is taken as representative of his writing. While a larger corpus of Howard’s work might indeed provide a wider perspective on his style, the advantage on concentrating on just one of the novels is that the results produced are more manageable and easier to interpret pragmatically in their context (for a discussion of the advantages of using small, domain-specific corpora in pragmatic research see Vaughan and Clancy, 2012). Index 7 Clusters, defined by Scott (2013) as ‘words which are found repeatedly together in each others’ company, in sequence’, have been known to be highly functional in real spoken interaction, as ‘they reflect the interpersonal meanings (meanings which build and consolidate personal and social relations) created between speakers and listeners (writers and readers)’ (Carter and McCarthy 2006: 835). In recent work (Amador-Moreno, forthcoming), I point out that quotatives are among the most frequent 2-word clusters in CIDN. Table 1 below shows the combinations personal pronoun + go; personal pronoun + be + like; and I + be + there, all of which introduce variation in the narrative as an alternative to more traditional quotative verbs such as say. Table 1. Wordlist of 2-word clusters in CIDN 1 AND I 18 TO THE 2 AND I'M 19 THE OLD 3 I'M THERE 20 AND THE 4 IN THE 21 AND SHE'S 5 HE GOES 22 OUT OF 6 AND HE 23 HAVE TO 7 OF THE 24 HE'S LIKE 8 I GO 25 WE'RE TALKING 9 ON THE 26 AND THEN 10 I'M LIKE 27 OF A 11 AND SHE 28 AND IT'S 12 SHE GOES 29 OF COURSE 13 AND GOES 30 AT THE 14 I DON'T 31 ME AND 15 AND HE'S 32 SHE'S LIKE 16 TO BE 33 TO SAY 17 GOING TO 34 I JUST The use of quotatives and their rapid rise as a global innovation has been documented in most English-speaking countries, and this includes Ireland too. Its recent prominence in different spoken varieties of English is attested by the growing literature on this topic (e.g. Cukor-Avila 2002; Ferrara & Bell 1995 in the United States; Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2004, 2007; Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999 in Canada, Buchstaller 2006, 2014; Durham et al. 2014, Macaulay 2001 in the UK, 8 Index and Buchstaller & D’Arcy 2009 in New Zealand). Empirical analyses of quotatives in some of these studies have shown that the use of these forms is affected by external linguistic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity and language variety of the speaker, and by internal variables such as grammatical person of the subject, discourse-function of the quotation, and tense. In the section that follows I start by summarizing my findings in relation to internal variables and then discuss the interplay between class, gender and linguistic variety in the novel, based on the use of quotatives. 4. The construction of male narration in Dublin English Previous analyses of like as a discourse marker led on to a more detailed study of quotatives in the CIDN corpus. A comparison of the use of quotative forms in the CIDN dataset revealed (Amador-Moreno, forthcoming) that of all the structures employed in the novel to report speech/thought, quotative go (preceded by subject), as in “…and we all go ‘Oh, yeah, roysh’”, was the most recurrent, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Quotative uses of go, be there and be like8 Reports from several varieties of English have revealed that go is mainly a feature appearing at higher levels of frequency in the speech of young people (Tagliamonte 8 The total count includes simple present and simple past tense forms of these quotatives (e.g. go/goes/going/went), which were retrieved using the concordancer suite in WordSmith Tools. The concordancer output for each quotative was then sorted manually to eliminate all instances that did not introduce direct quotation. Quotative uses of go also include the continuous form going, given its narrative function. For the purpose of this study, the structure be + there + going (e.g. “and I’m there going, ‘Cool,’”) was counted as separate quotative category, although it is included in the column of go in the figures shown here. Index 9 and Hudson 1999; Macaulay 2001; Cukor-Avila 2002; Buchstaller 2006). A feature in flux (Britain 2010: 43), much of the literature dealing with this particular quotative, has focused on its diffusion and sociolinguistic significance in comparison to be like. As Buchstaller (2006) points out, some researchers have suggested that be like will eventually push go out of the quotative system. However, if Howard’s representation of Dublin English is to be taken as an indicator, what his rendering of quotatives in the present corpus shows is that, while the variants certainly exist side by side in present day spoken Dublin English, no such push seems to be in progress. Quotative uses of like, combining subject + be + like as in “He answers the door and straight away I’m like, ‘Well?’”, are also rather significant in the novel. They occur with pronominal forms (I, he and she) as shown in table 1 above, as well as with first names, and we find them in the past tense, as well as in the present. Quotative like is used to foreground reported speech and thought, as discussed by Ferrara and Bell (1995) and Romaine and Lange (1991). The pattern be + like has been considered a case of grammaticalisation, where a single processing unit becomes automated (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004), and it has received a large amount of attention in different varieties of English (e.g. Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999; Macaulay 2001; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004; Buchstaller 2006). Its occurrence in Irish English has recently been studied by Höhn (2012), who compares the use of quotatives in two corpora: ICE-Jamaica (International Corpus of English – Jamaica component) and ICE-Ireland (International Corpus of English – Ireland component). Höhn’s findings (2012: 273) indicate that although go and be + like are both present in the ICE-Ireland corpus, the most frequent quotative appears to be say. In the CIDN data, as shown in Figure 2 below, the use of quotative say (counting both present and past forms of the verb) is comparatively lower than the ‘new’ quotatives9: Figure 2. Results of quotative forms in CIDN compared 9 However one drawback of the ICE-Ireland corpus when using it comparatively is that it contains mostly speech produced by educated speakers, which makes it rather standard; also, her study does not differentiate between Northern Irish English and Southern Irish English. 10 Index This is not surprising, given the fact that new quotatives, as argued above, have a more dramatic effect than verbs like say in narratives and have a stronger rapportbuilding effect than say. In the context of the novel, say is embedded in reported speech or else part of the cluster as if to say, which introduces reported thought. Notice, for example, the contrast (in terms of dramatic effect) between be + going, be + like and be + there and say in the following examples from the CIDN corpus: (1) I go, ‘Sorcha, can I remind you that we’re still married,’ and she’s there, ‘Daddy says I can get an annulment,’ and I’m like, ‘Don’t change the subject,’ and there’s this, like, silence on the line, roysh, then she goes, ‘OH MY GOD! You don’t know what an annulment is, do you?’ (2) After a few minutes I go, ‘I think I’ve spotted a weakness in their back row,’ and Fionn goes, ‘I know it was you, Ross,’ and I just stare at him, as if to say, basically, prove it, and he’s there, ‘She rang me. Your friend, Leilani. She felt bad about what she did,’ and I look at him as if to say, Whatever! In Höhn’s study, the new quotatives were almost exclusively restricted to private dialogues, the most informal type of register. Based on the premise that the less formal the interaction, the higher the use of direct quotation for narrative and involvement purposes, I have argued that Howard’s rendering of new quotatives seems to tally well with Höhn’s findings, and also with the conclusions in relation to its occurrence in ICE-Ireland reached by Kallen (2013: 191), who draws attention to the fact that ‘the overall picture is one which suggests that speakers of Irish English adopted quotative like in ICE-related contexts sooner than their British counterparts’. As pointed out above, an important aspect of Howard’s style is the imitation of the vividness often contained in private, informal interactions among friends. The use of go, be + like and be + there + like in the novel, therefore, contributes to a more realistic portrayal of the voices recreated in the story. The fact that the majority of the ‘new’ quotatives are used in the present Index 11 tense in the corpus, as shown in Figure 3 below, is also in line with the stylistic effect sought by Howard. Figure 3. Past and present tenses uses compared When tracing the grammaticalization pattern of be + like, Ferrara and Bell (1995), and later Barbieri (2005) too, observed that third-person usage had increased over time and argued that this indicated a significant change from previous studies (e.g. Romaine and Lange 1991 on American English), where this structure was typically used for ‘self-representation’ (cf. a recent study by Durham et al. 2011, where they notice first-person respondents favouring be + like). Höhn (2012) shows that be + like was already used in IrE in the early 1990s, and became a lot more popular as time passed. Her findings point in a different direction to what Ferrara and Bell had predicted in relation to subject person usages: after analysing the development of be + like in the ICE-Ireland data, Höhn’s study of IrE (comparing data from 19901994 and 2002-2005), leads her to the conclusion that there is no expansion of use from first-person to third-person contexts as the frequency of be + like increases in IrE. In contrast, the present results based on the CIDN corpus seem to be more in line with the trajectory of development observed in the American English data, as shown in Figure 4 below. Figure 4. Distribution across grammatical person of quotatives 12 Index However, as I have pointed out (Amador-Moreno, forthcoming), given that Höhn’s study does not focus on Dublin English only, the discrepancy between her data and the CIDN results in relation to be + like could be indicative of regional differences within IrE, or of other sociolectal differences that would need to be investigated in more detail; or else it might be simply due to the fact that the type of discourse genre that is represented in the CIDN corpus, lends itself better to reporting the speech of others. Figure 4 also shows that in the CIDN corpus, go is used more frequently to report the speech of others than to quote one’s own speech. This seems to match Höhn’s findings (2012), which reveal that in the case of quotative go, third-person subjects become more frequent as time passes, following the trend observed by Barbieri (2005) in American English. In contrast to its other two counterparts, the pattern be + there, as can be observed in Figure 4, seems to operate more consistently with first-person subjects, which suggests a clear-cut distinction in terms of self-representation of the narrative voice vis-à-vis the voices of others. This forms part of the stylistic strategy that employs direct speech as a means of constructing a reliable narrator whose words are not actually reported, but witnessed within the fictional world in which they are produced (Short et al. 2002). A curiosity in how the character of Ross reports the voices of others is to observe whether there is a correlation between the voicing of male/female speech and a particular quotative. Figure 5 shows gender preferences within third-person reporting in the CIDN corpus: Figure 5. Reporting of male and female voices within third-person subjects Index 13 600 500 400 male female 300 200 100 0 go be + there be + like As can be appreciated from the graph shown in Figure 5, the type of ‘male gossip’ that Ross engages in involves first of all more talk about what males say than about what females do. Of the three quotative forms, go tends to collocate more often with the reporting of male words/thoughts/actions, while in the case of be + there the number of times that this structure is used to report males is double the amount of female reporting. Be + like is the only quotative that is more or less balanced in terms of the reporting of both sexes. In terms of how Ross’s identity is signaled through his own voice, the ‘speaker sex’ factor as rendered in the novel is, of course, of great interest too. Sex differentiation in be like and go use has been suggested in studies dealing with quotatives, both from a perceptual perspective and when evaluating actual use. Early research on this feature focused on how people perceived it. For example, Blyth, Recktenwald and Wang’s (1990) attitudinal survey from the late 1980s (when the North American quotative system began to expand) showed that the majority of their respondents considered be + like as a female marker, associating it with California teenage girls. In Dailey-O’Cain’s (2000) U.S. study, 80 percent of respondents identified be + like with women, whereas Buchstaller’s analysis of UK data (2006) found that only 34 percent of respondents associated be + like with women. Speaker’s perceptions, however, do not necessarily correspond with actual language use. While Tagliamonte and D’Arcy (2006) suggest that sex differentiation in be + like use is evident in Toronto as new quotatives spread (see also Tagliamonte 2012: 249-258), the results obtained by Durham et al. (2012), in contrast, suggest ‘a mild form of neutralization of the speaker sex effect’ (Durham et al. 2012: 325), which seems to point in the direction of variability across communities. As they argue, ‘social constraints on quotative variation often change from community to community, as patterns of linguistic variation map onto local social and stylistic differences in community specific ways’ (Durham et al. 2012: 328). A comparison of the results obtained in two geographically close settings, would lend further support to such argument: in his study of quotative use in 14 Index Glasgow, Macauley (2001) finds that young women tend to use quotative like more frequently. Working class adult women used go most frequently, even though the overall picture showed that the adults in his survey used say as the most frequent quotative verb. Middle-class girls favoured the use of be + like, whereas middleclass boys preferred go as a quotative over be + like. In the Irish context, Höhn (2012) finds that be + like is equally frequent in male and female quotative use in ICE-Ireland, while quotative go represents a slightly larger proportion of female than male quotative use, and the traditional say occurs more frequently in male than female quotative use. When looking at the development of the forms, though, Höhn notices that the recent data shows a preference for be + like in male speakers, and that there is a clear trend shift in the use of go from female to male preference. Say, on the other hand, seems to evolve in the opposite direction: although in the first collection periods of her study it occurs most frequently in male speech, the opposite is true in more recent periods. Given the prominent presence of go, and be + like in the speech of Ross, what Howard seems to be hinting at in his ‘caricature’ of southern Dubliners (which has an evident comic effect) is not only that both go and be + like are nowadays deeply embedded in the speech of Dublin middle-class male speakers in their twenties, but that be + there also has a role to play as part of the ‘new’ quotative repertoire in present-day Dublin English (see Figure 2 again for a comparison of be + there and be + like). The fact that be + there collocates most frequently with the first person pronoun would seem to indicate that (according to Howard’s perception) Dublin middle-class males have a preference for this form when reporting themselves. The trend shift in the use of go from female to male preference observed by Höhn is clearly replicated in Ross’s discourse (who comes across as a super self-centered individual), and it may also be indexical of the changes that Dublin English is undergoing at present. It also shows that, as pointed out by Durham et al. (2012: 327), as quotatives continue ‘to diffuse globally, the social meaning associated with [their] use does not necessarily diffuse along with the surface form. Rather, individual communities adapt the innovation in the context of local social and economic conditions and local symbolism’. Indeed, this adaptation seems to have taken place in the context of Dublin, where the use of these quotative forms has come to symbolise the ‘new’/’fashionable’ speaker (see Hickey 2005: 7-8) as opposed to the ‘local’ speaker, highlighting linguistically the socioeconomic divide between the north and the south sides of the city. Thus what in one variety of English may initially have been perceived as ‘stigmatized, ungrammatical, and indicative of casual speech’ (Blyth, Recktenwald and Wang 1990: 223), in another it might end up becoming a high prestige form –or at least a clear social differentiator, if it continues to be identified as a dissociation marker (see Hickey 2005: 69-71). Whether or not the fictionalization of this phenomenon will contribute to perpetuating the association between the use of quotatives and the ‘new’/’fashionable’ speaker, enregistering it as a dialectal feature characteristic of south Dublin speech, is something that we will be able to reevaluate in years to come. What is evident from the CIDN corpus is that the use of quotatives in present-day Dublin English is part of the current general perception of how Dublin middle-class male speakers narrate stories. The fact that Howard incorporates it so successfully in his writing, and the fact that readers respond to the fictionalization of these forms indicates that the use of these forms in Howard’s writing are worth Index 15 investigating. From a sociolinguistic perspective, then, the present study foregrounds the utility, value, and richness of this type of data for investigation of sociolinguistic identities and (sociolinguistic) indices of community (cf. Vaughan and Clancy 2013). 5. Conclusions This chapter started by referring to perceptual dialectology and by making the point that fictional writing also falls within the category of what can be considered ‘nonspecialists’ perceptions’ of language use. Literary renderings of dialect, although certainly subjective, are among the most influential elements that contribute to the process of enregisterment, and to the social recognition of certain features as characteristic of a particular type of speaker. The old question of whether fiction creates or reflects reality is very much present in work dealing with literary dialect, and although it is not a new question, it is still a question that needs to be raised and to which this chapter contributes in a small way. By focusing on Paul Howard’s writing, and on his use of quotatives, the chapter has explored how the author manages to convey issues related to gender and social class. The type of information that readers receive through the narrative voice helps them identify the main character more solidly, without the author having to resort to description. Some of the questions that were asked at the outset had to do with reader’s as well as with author’s awareness: whether fiction writing contributes to the creation of certain linguistic trends that may end up being associated with specific speech communities; or whether the fact that certain authors show an interest in replicating real spoken discourse in their work influence readers’ perception of how a particular speech community behaves verbally. In the case of the RO’CK series, both trends probably feed off each other. Whether or not the use of quotatives in the novel will in future just reflect a linguistic fashion that ended up dying out is something that will be worth reconsidering. For the moment, what is interesting from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, is what the modern reader is implicitly asked to reflect on: first of all, what type of speaker uses new quotatives in Dublin English? (what does it mean that a male speaker like Ross uses new quotatives?) and secondly, are new quotatives indexical of a particular social group in present-day Dublin English? The discussion here has not revolved around how realistic Howard’s writing is, nor whether his novels deserve the label ‘literature’; rather, it has centered on the creative potential of his style, highlighting his ability to manipulate language in order to map social contexts and raise awareness among readers. Corpus analysis of the patterning of quotative forms in the data points towards the prominence of be + like, be + there and go in narratives. What emerges from this study is a close correspondence with patterns associated with private speech, and the value of this type of data for sociolinguistic analysis. Further studies comparing Howard’s perception of how quotatives function in contemporary Dublin English and real spoken data will help to determine its status as a new quotative in this particular urban variety and more broadly in Irish English in general. 16 Index NB: Articles should not show capitalisation, but books should – check all entries, please. *All* names should have first names written out (including editors, please check) References Agha, Asif. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23: 231-273. Amador-Moreno, Carolina P. 2010a. An Introduction to Irish English. London/Oakville: Equinox. Amador-Moreno, Carolina P. 2010b. How can corpora be used to explore literary speech representation? In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. O’Keeffe, Anne and McCarhty, Michael (eds.). London: Routledge, 531-544. Amador-Moreno, Carolina P. 2012. A corpus-based approach to contemporary Irish writing: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s use of like as a discourse marker. International Journal of English Studies. Special Issue: A New Approach to Literature: Corpus Linguistics. 12(2), 19-38. Amador Moreno, Carolina P. and McCafferty, Kevin. 2015. ‘[B]ut sure its only a penny after all’: Irish English discourse marker sure. In Tansatlantic perspectives in Late Modern English. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics. Marina Dossena (ed.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 179-197. Amador-Moreno, Carolina P. forthcoming a. ‘There’s, like, total silence again, roysh, and no one says anything’. Fictional representations of ‘new’ pragmatic markers and quotatives in Irish English. In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. Amador Moreno, Carolina P, Elaine Vaughan and Kevin McCafferty (eds.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barbieri, Federica. 2005. 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Hickey, Raymond (ed.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-14. Höhn, Nicole. 2012. ‘And they were all like ‘What’s going on?’: New quotatives in Jamaican and Irish English. In Mapping Unity and Diversity World-Wide: Corpus-Based Studies of New Englishes Marianne Hundt and Ulrike Gut (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 263-290. Kallen, Jeffrey. 2013. Irish English, volume 2 – The Republic of Ireland. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Macaulay, Ronald. 2001. You’re like ‘why not?’ The quotative expressions of Glasgow adolescents. Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 5(1): 3-21. Melchers, Gunnel. 2010. Southern English in writing. In Varieties of English in Writing. The written word as linguistic evidence. Hickey, Raymond. (ed.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 81-98. Montoro, Rocío. 2012. Chick Lit. The Stylistics of Capuccino Fiction. London and New York: Continuum. Preston, Dennis R. 1999. Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Volume 1. Dennis R. Preston (ed.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Preston, Dennis R. and George M. Howe. 1987. Computerized studies of mental dialect maps. In Variation in Language: NWAV-XV at Stanford, Stanford University, Keith Denning et al. (eds) Palo Alto, CA: Department of Linguistics, Stanford University. 361-78. 18 Index Quaglio, Paulo. 2009. Television Dialogue. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Romaine, Suzanne and Lange, Deborah. 1991. The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: a case of grammaticalization in progress. American speech 66:227-279. Sayers, Dave. 2014. The mediated innovation model: a framework for researching media influence in language change. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/2, 2014: 185–212 Scott, Mike. 2013. WordSmith Tools, version 6.0. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Short, Michael, Semino, Elena and Wynne, Martin. 2002. Revisiting the notion of faithfulness in discourse report/(re)presentation using a corpus approach. Language and Literature 11:4. 325-55. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2012. Variationist Sociolinguistics. Change, Observation, Interpretation. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Tagliamonte, Sali A. and D’Arcy, Alex. 2004. He’s like, she’s like: The quotative system in Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8, 493-514 Tagliamonte, Sali A. and D’Arcy, Alex. 2007. Frequency and variation in the community grammar: tracking a new change through the generations. Language Variation and Change 19(2). 199-217. Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Hudson, Rachel. 1999. Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 3 (2): 147-172. Tagliamonte, Sali and Roberts, Chris. 2005. So weird; so cool; so innovative: The use of intensifiers in the television series Friends. American Speech 80: 280– 300. Tannen, Deborah. 1982. Oral and literate strategies in spoken and written narratives. Language, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), 1-21. Vaughan, Elaine and Clancy, Brian. 2012. Small corpora and Pragmatics. In Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013: New Domains and Methodologies. Jesús Romero-Trillo (ed.) Berlin: Springer, 53-73. Wales, Katie. 2010. Northern English in writing. In Varieties of English in Writing. The written word as linguistic evidence. Hickey, Raymond (ed.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 61-80. Walshe, Shane. 2009. Irish English as represented in film. vol. 53. Peter Lang. Index 19