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.