Brian Clancy is a lecturer in applied linguistics at Mary Immaculate College, Ireland. His research work focusses on the blend of a corpus linguistic methodology with the discourse analytic approaches of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. His primary methodological interests relate to the use of corpora in the study of language varieties and the construction and analysis of small corpora. His published work explores language use in intimate settings, such as between family and close friends, and the language variety Irish English. He is author of Investigating Intimate Discourse: Exploring the spoken interaction of families, couples and close friends (Routledge, 2016) and co-author, with Anne O’Keeffe and Svenja Adolphs, of Introducing Pragmatics in Use (Routledge, 2011 and 2020). 

ABSTRACT

Intimate discourse, the spoken interaction between couples, families and close friends, has been identified as a site of heightened linguistic creativity where metaphor, idiom, slang and hyperbole proliferate. It has also been shown to be a high involvement speech style characterised by a high frequency of items such as vocatives, engagement response tokens, third person pronouns, boosters and vague language. However, the domain, while not underappreciated, has been largely overlooked by corpus researchers in favour of other spoken domains such as the workplace or the classroom. To explore the import of intimate discourse, this workshop primarily focuses on the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT), a c.600,00-word spoken corpus comprising transcriptions of spoken encounters in the domain. LINT represents established intimate relationships, characterised by, amongst other things, speakers that have shared close physical proximity over a lengthy time period. A suite of corpus tools including frequency lists, keyword and concordance lines will be employed to identify some of the most important linguistic items in the domain and examine their function in relation to the maintenance and reinforcement of close interpersonal relationships. This analysis of established intimacy is complemented by a foray into nascent intimacy, the beginnings of intimacy in a romantic context. To this end, a corpus of 57,800-word corpus of 35 individual dates taken from the reality TV show First Dates Ireland is utilised. Linguistic patterns in these nascent encounters will be compared to those in established intimate discourse. Inter alia, questions of authenticity, the nature of performed intimacy and the harnessing of unscripted TV dialogue as a vehicle for linguistic analysis in an intimate context will be addressed.