An analysis of the historical performance of reproaches in Irish English in CORIECOR
What is it about?
This article looks at a so far overlooked speech act and analyses the micro-level linguistic items that affect the (im)politeness effect of each of the utterances observed. It combines approaches to (im)politeness theory and sheds light on the pragmatics of historical Irish English.
Why is it important?
The key element of this article is bifold: Firstly, it observes reproaches, which had so far been greatly overlooked within the scholarship on speech acts, thus contributing to their further understanding as a speech act on its own right. Secondly, it takes a fluid and comprehensive approach to (im)politeness and looks at micro-level pragmatic unit from a perspective that encompasses a wide range of realisations of reproaches. It focuses specifically on what is described as "Face Enhancing Reproaches" but opens the ground for further research to be made to fully understand the complexities of this speech act.