"Sure it wouldn't be right" Sure as a discourse marker in a corpus of Irish English from from the 18th to the 20th century

Abstract

This is a study of sure, surely, to be sure, sure enough, but sure and no sure that are used discourse markers in Irish English. The study has been based on A corpus of Irish English (Hickey 2003) which is a collection of texts from the medieval period to the 20th century. The discourse markers were extracted from the corpus with Wordsmith tools and analysed with Goldvarb. Studies by Amador Moreno (2006), Walshe (2009) and Aijmer (2007)have been used as references and comparison.