ABSTRACT
Although the notions of (im)politeness, dialect, and identity construction have been thoroughly investigated in contemporary Irish English (cf. Clancy 2005, 2011, 2020), there seems to be a dearth of academic studies addressing (im)politeness from a historical linguistics perspective. This chapter, based on a corpus of Irish emigrants’ personal correspondence, aims to explore the use of (im)politeness strategies in the construction of Irish identity. In doing so, this study resorts to a subcorpus of CORIECOR (Amador-Moreno, 2022) in order to shed light on the characteristics of family talk that have historically defined the base dialect for Irish English speakers. Anchored in the theoretical basis of the corpus pragmatics framework, the ultimate goal here is to propose a twofold analytical method to investigate the patterns of language found in speech acts involving facework within the context of family talk. This model is put into practice by delving into the contextual implications of the mental verb hope for (im)politeness strategies in the data. Finally, this chapter introduces new avenues for further research in this area with the intention of pushing forward the analysis of speech acts and the implications of politeness strategies as key elements in the social construction of a community’s identity.
