“Well He’s Sick Anyway Like”: Anyway in Irish English

Abstract

AbstractThe paper describesanywayin the Irish component of the International Corpus of International English (ICE-IRL) and similarities and differences in its use compared with other varieties of English represented in the ICE-Corpus. The findings showed thatanywaywas most frequent in ICE-IRL closely followed by the Canadian component of the ICE-Corpus. It was least frequent in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. The present analysis has demonstrated thatanywayin Irish English has a distinctive pragmatic profile which is based on its position in the peripheries and what it is doing there.Anywayin the left periphery was placed after an intrusive topic, a digression, a correction, interruption by the hearer and permits the speaker to resume the topic in an explicit way. In Irish Englishanywayin the right periphery was above all an attenuating politeness marker.Anywaywas found with a hedging meaning in contexts where it restricted the validity of a proposition by making a correction or adjustment of some kind. The high frequency ofanywayin the right periphery as a hedging pragmatic marker can be analysed in terms of its capacity to index a special kind of Irishness characterized by the absence of self-promotion and avoidance of social distance