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)
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