Regensburg Papers in Linguistics

Die Regensburg Papers in Linguistics werden in unregelmäßigen Abständen vom Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft herausgegeben. Sie stellen Einblicke in die aktuelle Forschung des Lehrstuhls dar und bieten einen Raum um exzellente Abschlussarbeiten des B.A. und M.A.-Studiengangs einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen. Die Veröffentlichung erfolgt im Open Access-Format auf dem Publikationsserver der Universität Regensburg.

Aktueller Band 20

Morphosyntactic Reflexes of Irish in Irish English: A corpus-based study on their distribution across registers (Wiesmeier, Rebekka)

Abstract

In Ireland, English and Irish have been in contact for centuries and influenced each other mutually. Nowadays, English is the dominant language on the island, but in a distinctive variation that shows influences of the Irish language: Irish English. The main objective of this thesis is to find systematic correspondence between the frequency of these reflexes of Irish in Irish English and the medium and the degree of formality of the registers these reflexes are contained in. To this end, eleven features of Irish English that originated from contact with Irish were selected and extracted from the Ireland Compartment of the International Corpus of English. The number of these occurrences in each register of the corpus was then put into relation with the medium (spoken or written) and the formality of the register. To determine the formality of a register, a scale of formality based on the situational characteristics of the language production event was created, ranging from 0 for least formal to 12 for most formal. The main findings of this analysis were firstly that the number of Irish English features is higher in spoken than in written registers. Secondly, reflexes of Irish in Irish English are more frequent in informal than in formal registers: the more formal a register is, the fewer Irish influences will be found in it.

Der Text stellt eine überarbeitete Version der B.A.-Arbeit der Autorin dar, die sie 2021 an der Fakultät für Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften der Universität Regensburg eingereicht hat.

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