The study of Irish English (IrE) on the phonological, grammatical and lexical levels is long established. Research on the pragmatics of Irish English, in contrast, is a recent endeavour, going back to the early years of this millennium. The aim of this long-term project is to identify the specific nature of appropriate language use in Irish English with relation to politeness theories. To this aim, the framework of variational pragmatics (Schneider/ Barron 2008, Barron/ Schneider 2009) is employed whereby language use in Irish English is contrasted with language use in other varieties of English. The focus of this project to date has been on the speech acts of apologising, offering and requesting. In addition, the pragmatic marker sure has been analysed across varieties, as have the use of tag questions. As well as contrasting patterns of language use in Irish English with those of other varieties of English, the research has also investigated patterns of language use within Irish English according to region (e.g. North/ South), gender and age. Corpus data, production questionnaire data (DCTs, FDCTs) and retrospective qualitative interviews have been the primary sources of data analysed.

Current research within the pragmatics of Irish English focuses on expressions of gratitude in online corpora, apologies in production questionnaires and on directives and responses to gratitude using interactional data from the Lueneburg Direction-Giving (LuDiG) corpus, a corpus of direction-giving interactions elicited for this project using a Labovian methodology.