Irish English and Irish Studies: exploring language use and identity through fictional constructions of laddism

ABSTRACT

The construction of a linguistic collective identity uses a pool of conscious and unconscious elements that deal with age, gender, or ethnic belonging. In the Irish communicative system, one present-day type of collective masculine identity is that of “the lads.” Previous studies on “laddish” behaviour and performance from literary or social perspectives explored conduct in contexts such as sports, violence, sex, or alcohol. To encourage interdisciplinary research in the field of Irish Studies, this paper analyses the language of “the lads” in literary discourse through corpus linguistics as a contribution to the field of digital humanities. Fourteen novels make up the specialised corpus on which the analysis is based paying attention to verbs of speech and adverbs. The verbs show utterances by “the lads” illustrating and providing aggressiveness and adverbs provide a second layer of meaning. Finally, a number of power struggles these characters experience in interaction are studied to differentiate the status quo of “the lads.”

KEYWORDS:

• Corpus linguistics
• Irish Studies
• masculinities
• Irish English
• lads

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the authors and publishers who granted access to the novels in online format and the copyrights to analyse their novels: John McGahern’s publisher Florence Rees, Paul Murray, Roddy Doyle, and Dermot Bolger.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See more on education in Kehily and Nayak, “‘Lads and Laughter’” and in Phipps and Young, “Neoliberalisation and ‘Lad Cultures’ in Higher Education;” on sociology in King, “The Lads” or Gough and Edwards, “The Beer Talking,” and in cinema in Ging’s, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema.

2. Cf. Bucholtz and Hall, “Locating Language in Identity”; and Hickey and Amador-Moreno, Irish Identities.

3. Murphy and Farr, “The Use of Vocatives.”

4. Ibid., 214.

5. Curtin and Linehan, “Where the Boys Are,” 65; and Jeffries, “Pull without Being Nasty,” 908.

6. Hickey, Dublin English, 90.

7. Hickey, “Yes, That’s the Best,” 10.

8. See note 3 above.

9. Murphy, Corpus and Sociolinguistics.

10. Ibid., 23.

11. See for instance Doyle, “Male Trouble” or Jeffries, “’Is It Okay to Go Out on the Pull without It Being Nasty?’”

12. Cf. Hickey, “Irish English Studies.”

13. Fox, Cronin and Ó Conchubhair, Routledge International Handbook.

14. Phipps et al., “Rape Culture, Lad Culture,” 1; and Jackson, “Motives for ‘Laddishness’,” 583.

15. Doyle, “Male Trouble,” 138; and Jeffries, “Pull without Being Nasty,” 909.

16. Johnston and Morrison, “The Presentation of Masculinity,” 667.

17. Coates, Men Talk, 2.

18. Cf. Coates, Men Talk, 56; Dempster, “Having Balls, Having All?” 481; and Jeffries, “Pull without Being Nasty,” 916.

19. This corpus was compiled by Tully (2021) as part of her PhD thesis. The corpus is not publicly available, as there are copyrighted materials and restrictions on the re-use of third-party data apply. Many thanks to the authors and publishers who granted access to the novels in online format and the copyrights to analyse their novels: John McGahern’s publisher Florence Rees, Paul Murray, Roddy Doyle, and Dermot Bolger. The fourteen novels are: Dermot Bolger’s The Journey Home (2003), The Valparaiso Voyage (2002), New Town Soul (2010); Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987); John McGahern’s The Leavetaking (2009), That We May Face the Rising Sun (2009), The Dark (2008), Amongst Women (2008/1990); Paul Murray’s An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2004); Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012), All We Shall Know (2016), From a Low and Quiet Sea (2018); Patrick McCabe’s The Dead School (1996); and finally, Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman (2015).

20. Kilgarriff et al., “The Sketch Engine,” 7. Both institutional ethical guidelines and international codes of conduct and guidelines on legal issues related to intellectual property rights and ownership were followed in the usage of these texts.

21. Ibid., 8.

22. Evison, “Basics of Analysing a Corpus,” 129.

23. Jakubíček et al., “Fast Syntactic Searching,” 741.

24. Figure 1 shows a number of descriptors that accompany “lad.” These include adjectives like “bad” in the sentence “lad is bad,” a description which a contextual analysis shows to refer to the physical state of a particular male character when hospitalised. There is also the aforementioned drinking in the sections with modifiers and verbs that accompany the searched word, e.g. “drink, lad,” or instances in which “lad” works as a subject: “the lads bounced” or “lads started.”

25. Jeffries, “Pull without Being Nasty,” 910.

26. Bolger, The Valparaiso Voyage, 297.

27. Ryan, All We Shall Know, 137.

28. Cf. Tully, “Stuck in the Old Times,” 128.

29. Jeffries, “Pull without Being Nasty,” 922.

30. See note 23 above.

31. Normalisation consists of extrapolating raw frequencies from different-sized corpora so that they can be shown by a common factor (Evison 126). The results can be expressed by occurrences per thousand or million words. In order to do this, the raw frequency of the token that is shown is divided by the total amount of words of the corpus and then multiplied by 1,000 or 1,000,000 respectively; thus, showing how frequent a particular word is in the corpus.

32. Caldas-Coulthard, “Reported Speech,” 153–63.

33. Ruano San Segundo, “Corpus-Stylistic Approach Dickens,” 114.

34. Zwicky, “In a Manner of Speaking,” 223.

35. Murray, Evening of Long Goodbyes, 106.

36. Doyle, The Barrytown Trilogy, 57.

37. Ibid.

38. Murray, Evening of Long Goodbyes, 264–65.

39. Caldas-Coulthard, “Reported Speech,” 163.

40. Garcia, Coping and Suicide, 28.

41. McGahern, Face the Rising Sun, 54.

42. Doyle, The Barrytown Trilogy, 58.

43. Cf. History: Colella, “That Inscrutable Something”; Pionke, “Excavating Victorian Cuba”; and Liddle, “Genre”; Sociology: cf. Rubtcova et al, “Corpus-Based Conceptualization in Sociology.”

44. Pilný, “Irish Studies Continental Europe,” 217–18.