Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Vaughan, Elaine and Máiréad Moriarty
14th International Pragmatics Association Conference
Constructing and Contesting Authenticity: Investigating the discourse of the Irish television drama Love/Hate.
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Chaired Session
2015
()
0
Optional Fields
26-JUL-15
31-JUL-15

This paper addresses the relationship between authenticity and the construction of authenticity in fictional discourse from a number of different perspectives. Firstly, it compares and contrasts the nature of a corpus of fictional discourse from an Irish television drama, Love/Hate, with corpora of naturally occurring language, such as the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ireland, Kallen & Kirk, 2008), a one-million-word corpus, of which there are approximately 600k words of spoken Irish English from a variety of different contexts, and the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (Farr et al. 2002 [2004]), a one-million-word corpus of predominantly conversational data. Love/Hate is a drama broadcast by the Irish terrestrial station, RTÉ. It is set in Dublin’s gangland, and has generated both record-breaking viewing figures as well as various types of commentary on the setting, storyline, actors and, crucially for this paper, aspects of the language.

 The analysis triangulates this commentary with the corpus data, previous research on Irish English in general and Dublin English particularly (Hickey, 2005). The intriguing thing about commentary on the language of the series is a recurring fascination with the (perceived vast) distance between the language of the actors who play these violent gangster-type characters and the inner-city accents they stylize. The study isolates the pragmalinguistic features that are statistically key, or otherwise salient, from the perspective of their sociopragmatic import in the context of the fictional discourse, in contrast with the corpus data and in relation to their reception in the form of public commentary in various media types. As Piazza et al. (2011: 9) emphasise that the recreation and ‘re-presentation’ of the world, ‘time, place and discourse’ that telecinematic texts provide are ‘always in line with the specific socio-cultural conventions of the society in which the telecinematic texts are produced’ (a similar point is made by Amador-Moreno and McCafferty (2011) in relation to fictionalised orality). At the present study’s core is a concern with what authenticity means in the context of the relationship between fictional and naturally occurring discourse, how we might bring that into relief using corpora of varieties of English and, just as importantly, how constructions of a variety are received.