| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to analyse the use of the discourse-pragmatic markers (DPMs) ach, och, final but and wee in the dialogue of the television series Derry Girls (Leddy et al., 2018–2022), the language of which constitutes a fictional representation of Northern Irish English. The thesis analyses those DPMs from two points of view: (1) from a dialectological point of view, comparing their use – i.e., frequency and functions – in the series dialogue to their use in the Northern Irish component of the SPICE-Ireland corpus; and (2) from a characterisation point of view, exploring the idiolects of seven main characters through said DPMs and other keywords in their dialogue. In order to approach both sides of the thesis’ objective, a corpus containing the series dialogue was created and subsequently explored employing both quantitative and qualitative methods. Among the former were keyword searches and frequency count comparisons, as well as log-likelihood statistical significance tests. The qualitative methods employed included concordance searchers and the close reading of the results of these and the keyword searches. The main findings uncovered in the analysis were that ach and och have a wider range of functions than previously reported, and that wee can function as a minimiser and mitigator in Northern Irish English, as suggested in previous studies. However, due to the fictional nature of the dialogue, and to the fact that SPICE-Ireland was compiled almost two decades ago, these results should be verified in future studies by analysing more up-to-date real-life spoken language. In terms of characterisation, the analysis showed that the four titular Derry Girls have distinct idiolects when compared to each other and when contrasted with the older main characters. | |
