INVESTIGATING IRISH ENGLISH WITH ICEIRELAND

Résumé

The investigation of specific features of Irish English has a long tradition. Yet, with the arrival of large corpora and corpus tools, new avenues of research have opened up for the discipline. The present paper investigates features commonly ascribed to Irish English on the basis of the ICE Ireland corpus in comparison with ICE corpora representing other varieties of English. We use several corpus tools to access the ICE corpora. First, an offline concordance program, AntConc V 3.3 (Anthony 2004). Second, Corpus Navigator, an online corpus query tool allowing researchers to query regular expressions on the surface texts. Third, we are in the process of writing a version of Dependency Bank (Lehmann and Schneider 2012) which contains a selection of ICE corpora, and which will be called ICE online. This research methodology allows us to reassess how specific features found in Irish English are in comparison with other international varieties of English and illustrates that even simple corpus-based search patterns can produce powerful results.