Right Dislocations in Spoken Irish English

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: There are syntactic features which occur only in spoken language and they can be used for emphasis or to assure that the listener is still listening. This paper gives insights into the terminology of right dislocations (which means that the subject of the phrase is repeated either as a pronoun or with noun phrase and an operator) and afterwards analyses the different variants and their pragmatic function. Furthermore, two corpora are searched for instances of right dislocations in Irish English. The examples found in the corpus will be analysed for their pragmatic function. The aim of this study is to see whether right dislocations are indeed 'idiosyncratic Northern Irish' (British Library, Sounds Familiar, Web) or right dislocation is just a cliché of the Irish language.