Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Vaughan, Elaine & Máiréad Moriarty
New Perspectives on Irish English 3
As Irish as…Culture on display in Irish television advertising
University of Limerick, Ireland
Chaired Session
2015
()
0
Optional Fields
18-JUN-15
18-JUN-15

The data that this paper considers is taken from three recent advertisements for the German supermarket chain, Aldi.  These advertisements, as much of Aldi’s recent Irish-based advertising, play on easily recognisable tropes of Irish culture and Irish English, and are interesting for how they put this language and culture “on display” (cf. Johnstone 2009) by highlighting salient linguistic and pragmatic features of everyday conversational routines (cf. Coulmas 1981; Laver 1981). It is these recognisable, represented/reproduced aspects of everyday routinised communication situations of the advertisements that we focus on and analyse; first of all, we examine the construction of the represented routines, and how they might reflect routines as they are enacted in naturally occurring conversation. Then, in a more global sense, we analyse the phenomenon of the “As Irish as…” trope by drawing on Agha’s (2003, 2007) notion of enregisterment. Enregisterment is both a relatively new and conceptually rich notion, albeit now ubiquitous; conflated by Johnstone, amongst others, with its intellectual counterpart, Silverstein’s indexical orders (e.g. 2003), for example in relation to the metapragmatic associations that particular forms, or (we argue), routines, have with social (or, indeed, national) stereotypes. Essentially, we argue, having interrogated the nature of the conversational and cultural routines put on show, if enregisterment describes “the processes by which particular linguistic forms become linked with social meaning”, and those social meanings become linked with ideological schemes, these ideological schemes can, in turn, be invoked and commodified (Fairclough 1992).