ABSTRACT
The final chapter of the book revisits the findings in relation to audience and referee design, indexicality and the conversationalisation of discourse, as they relate to language ideological and sociolinguistic change. The chapter looks at how the categorisation of different varieties as audience or ingroup/outgroup referee design may change across the decades of the corpus and how this can reveal sociolinguistic change. Findings are reviewed in relation to the strategies used in the Irish Radio Advertisement Corpus (IRAC) to heighten indexicality of particular varieties and the chapter examines how indexical values of particular varieties may change through the decades. In relation to the conversationalisation of discourse as evidenced in IRAC, the chapter explores how the Action component of the ads, while it attempts to simulate everyday spoken language, falls short of achieving the intimacy of Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT), leading to the conclusion that the intimate discourse of the Action remains distinctively media based. The chapter considers the added value of the use of corpus linguistics (CL) tools in the analysis of sociolinguistic change in the advertising context and sets out some caveats in relation to its use. Finally, it highlights how the book demonstrates the flexibility of CL tools and methods and the importance of experimenting with and adapting existing methods for our particular research purposes.
