Pragmatics, Corpora and Irish English: Discourse-Pragmatic Markers in First Dates Ireland

This contribution uses a corpus of interaction from the Irish version of the reality television show, First Dates (First Dates Ireland; FDIrE), and explores how the interaction in FDIrE can be analysed as a site of contemporary Irish English, with a particular focus on its pragmatic features. The type of interaction, a first date, also makes FDIrE a rich site for pragmatic analysis in terms of how participants negotiate the complexities of this initial encounter in the broader context of what can be conceptualised as intimate discourse, interaction between couples, families and close friends. Hence, it is primarily a study not only of pragmatic aspects of Irish English as a variety, but that variety in a specific context and a context with very specific constraints. As the data is taken from a reality TV show, we are dealing with mediated versions of first dates and interaction that is subject to editing, indeed editorialising, for pace and drama. However, contemporary research in Irish English has shown itself to be open to and very much cognisant of the potential of different data sources, and we argue for the value of the First Dates Ireland as yielding interactional data on what we call nascent intimacy. We focus on items that have been termed, inter alia, discourse-pragmatic markers (DPMs), and focus on their use in context. This paper is positioned at the intersection of scholarship on pragmatics and research that is predicated on the use of corpora and corpus tools for linguistic analysis, or corpus pragmatics. Findings show that those DPMs that have been shown to characterise Irish English more generally certainly occur, but also that the use of specific DPMs have a particular resonance in this context, e.g. the DPM (be) like and its potential relationship with the disclosure of personal information.