Comparing spoken corpora of different language varieties affords
insights into not only the lexico-grammatical features of those varieties, but
also their pragmatic systems (e.g. O’Keeffe & Adolphs 2008). The most
frequent items in wordlists tend to be ‘small’ items, pronouns, determiners and
the like. Questioning further the ways in which high-frequency functional items
are used, particularly if they occur in differing proportions in different
corpora, can provide insights both intuited and unexpected about language
varieties. Hence, ‘the devil is in the detail’. This paper focuses on corpora
of Irish English, notably the Limerick Corpus of Irish English, a
one-million-word corpus of primarily casual conversation, in order to launch a
comparative investigation into the varietal nuances of items which fall into
traditional deictic categories, such as temporal (e.g. now) and spatial (e.g. there)
deixis. Clancy & Vaughan’s (2012) investigation of now highlighted a pragmatic function in clause-final position which
occurred more frequently in the Irish than British datasets used. Now was found to additionally function
in Irish English as a pragmatic marker, softening the impact of negative evaluations
or judgements, and as a deictic presentative, akin to the French violà. This paper investigates the linguistic
behaviour of another stalwart of the higher reaches of corpus frequency lists, there. Similarly to now, a nuanced investigation of there
unearths a potential varietal idiosyncrasy. We know that there functions existentially and as a spatial deictic marker.
However, corpus findings from LCIE also suggest a distinct function for there, while it does function
existentially and spatially, it also has what appears to be a temporal function.