Journal of Pragmatics 218 (2023) 62e70

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Journal of Pragmatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

There as a discourse-pragmatic marker in Irish English

Brian Clancy a, *, Carolina Amador-Moreno b, Elaine Vaughan c
a
Mary Immaculate College, South Circular Road, Limerick V94H28C, Ireland
b
Universidad de Extremadura, Avda. Universidad s/n, 10071 Ca ceres, Spain
c
University of Limerick, Castletroy, Limerick V94 T9PX, Ireland

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The upper ranks of corpus word frequency lists are primarily populated by functional
Received 9 March 2023 items, as well as by other small words characterised by their polysemy that reward
Received in revised form 18 September focussed attention and research. Exploring these items has resulted in rich and fruitful
2023
insights from a corpus pragmatic perspective. This paper focuses on the nature and value
Accepted 19 September 2023
Available online 19 October 2023
of there as a discourse-pragmatic marker in Irish English (IrE). We focus on intimate
discourse (i.e., the language used between family and friends), and use corpora of IrE to
trace and investigate the varietal nuances of there in this context. Our analysis acknowl-
Keywords:
Discourse-pragmatic there
edges the expected existential and locative functions and illustrates that there has specific
Corpus pragmatics discourseepragmatic properties in the intimate sphere in IrE. We argue that there has
Irish English acquired additional pragmatic dimensions and is used in the language of family and
Intimate discourse friends as, for example, an involvement marker or mitigator. In the discussion of the
Discourse-pragmatic markers development of there as a discourse-pragmatic marker, we consult historical data that
matches our focal context, and discuss the processes by which there has come to fulfil a
range of discourse-pragmatic functions in IrE.
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC
BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

1. Introduction

Despite its high frequency of occurrence and multifunctionality in spoken English conversation, the functions of there
more generally, and its discourse-pragmatic functions more specifically, as illustrated in examples (1)e(4), have received little
attention so far in the linguistic literature apart from one or two notable exceptions. Two of the examples, (1)e(2), are
attested, and (3)e(4) are from the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT; Clancy, 2016), an Irish English corpus of interaction
between friends and family.

(1) Just read your email there.

(2) I was talking to Mair
ead there.
(3) Did you record anything there over the weekend that we can stick on?
(4) Just send it on there now to myself.

Discourse-pragmatic uses of there such as (1)e(4), where they have been discussed at all, have been identified as primarily
discourse organisational in function and connected to spontaneous interactions such as panel discussions on TV or radio and
meetings (Lenker, 2018, x5.2). The present study, however, focusses on discourse-pragmatic uses of there in quite a different
context e informal private conversation between family and close friends, or intimate discourse (see Clancy, 2016). We

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: brian.clancy@mic.ul.ie (B. Clancy), carolina.amador@uib.no (C. Amador-Moreno), elaine.vaughan@ul.ie (E. Vaughan).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.09.015
0378-2166/© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
B. Clancy, C. Amador-Moreno and E. Vaughan Journal of Pragmatics 218 (2023) 62e70

contribute to the catalogue of studies that take corpus pragmatic approaches to the analysis of items that have traditionally
been treated from sentence-level, language-as-system perspectives, in order to reveal patterns in real-world contexts that
characterise the interpersonal in language-as-discourse. A corpus pragmatic analysis of there allows us to tap into its func-
tional meaning(s) in context by enabling us to establish patterns of use e.g. through the Key Word in Context (KWIC) tool. This
view of there illustrates a spatio-temporal character in its patterning with time stamps such as today, last week or a while ago
to its ‘right’ (referred to here as the ‘there þ time stamp’ in Section 4.1). Generating and randomising concordance lines allows
for a systematic view of there's discourse-pragmatic functions, not least of which is the use of there as an involvement marker
which can be connected to its discourse-deictic function. Patterns of colligation involving ‘imperative þ there’ where there
functions as a mitigator and/or booster are also revealed (see Section 4.2) alongside what appear to be specific situational
contexts in the data related to food and drink, in which there is used in a way that appears to merge its discourse-deictic and
discourse-pragmatic functions.
Our investigation of there in IrE involves data from two corpora that are ostensibly rather different but share a core
contextual characteristic in that they both contain interaction between family and friends, and feature users of IrE. The focal
corpus of contemporary Irish English is, as previously mentioned, LINT, a corpus of spoken interaction between intimates. It
contains approximately 560,000 words of spoken interaction collected in the early 2000s, and is a subcorpus of the one-
million-word Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE; see Clancy, 2016, pp. 35e40). The transcribed recordings that form
the corpus range across age, gender, socio-economic background and geographical location and they include conversations
recorded in a wide variety of locations throughout Ireland (excluding Northern Ireland). We use the Corpus of Irish English
Correspondence (CORIECOR; Amador-Moreno and McCafferty, 2012) as a complementary source. CORIECOR is a 3-million-
word collection of Irish emigrants' letters exchanged between family and friends from 1731 to 1940. The latter corpus is
obviously written rather than spoken, but as Montgomery (1995: 28) has convincingly argued, ‘[N]o other type of document,
be it dialect poetry, folk tales, or any other, reveals the speech patterns of earlier days nearly so well or as fully as family letters’
(see also Amador-Moreno, 2019).
The motivation for the isolation of context (intimate) and the use of these two corpora is an attempt not only to describe
the varietal nuances of the discourse-pragmatic marker (DPM) function of there in IrE, but also to explore and hypothesise
why it has developed additional functions as a DPM in IrE, though it is clearly not exclusive to it. The type of semantic
bleaching and pragmatic strengthening that characterises the process of grammaticalisation (or pragmaticalisation, in this
case) seems to be at play in the type of discourse-pragmatic there that we focus on and illustrated in examples (1)e(4). We
find the same discourse-pragmatic function of there in consulting the sample of historical IrE contained in the CORIECOR
corpus. The following example (5) is from 1815.

(5) You will I am sure, be sorry to hear of the Death of Sarah McNeilly she was Married to Mr Henry Kennedy of Dublin (who if you have not heard of is brother to
him who was married to her eldest sister) and died there last spring leaving an infant too young to feel its loss, the Child (a girl) is at [?] in [Mourne?] there has not
any [other alterations?] taken place in that family. (Charles Lewis, Kilkeel, Co. Down, Ireland, to his friend Davison McDowell, South Carolina, 30th September
1815).

In example (5), there is not locative, i.e. Sarah McNeilly did not die in Dublin. Although on first reading it can be interpreted
as an anaphoric reference to Dublin, there in this case has no clear antecedent. Its role in the sentence amplifies the dramatic
force of died, and highlights the recency of the event (last spring), thus showing a type of functional leakage (Agha 1996: 660)
between a spatial and a temporal meaning which we show is reinforced by its patterning with a time stamp (see Section 4.2).1
The emotional value of there in this type of construction focuses on the time reference and the dramatic force of the verb, not
on the indication of place. This, then, is the DPM function of there that we are concerned with.
Although our examples (1)e(5) come from IrE, and our discussion focuses primarily on IrE data, we are by no means
claiming this use of there as an exclusively IrE feature. While its occurrence in this specific variety of English can be found as
far back as 1815 at least (as in (5) above), and its use in Ireland had attracted the attention of earlier language observers like
Joyce (1910: 46), recent research into Canadian English has also shown vernacular usage in Northern Ontario (Tagliamonte
and Jankowski, 2020) illustrating its ubiquity and suggesting its occurrence might be due to (or at least reinforced by) the
influence of French. Language contact processes are also suggested by Joyce in the case of IrE, where the availability of Irish
Gaelic annso for here is seen as a possible reason for Dolan (2012: 151) defining there as a ‘filler in Hiberno-English2 dialogue’
in that it does not necessarily indicate location. Dolan provides the following example from Longford:

(6) Her brother-in-law came up here there last week. (Dolan 2012, s.v. there)

This paper creates a replicable functional framework for the analysis of there, and uses that framework to explore its
functional distribution in the spoken interaction of family and friends in IrE. This process allows us to identify instances of
discourse-pragmatic there and provide a more nuanced account of how it operates through an analysis of its linguistic

1
One reviewer pointed out the idea of ‘absorption’ as equally fitting. We agree with this as an apt representation of what has happened with there (see
discussion in Section 2).
2
‘Hiberno-English’ is used with the meaning of ‘Irish English’ (see terminological discussions in Hickey 2007; Amador-Moreno, 2010).

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B. Clancy, C. Amador-Moreno and E. Vaughan Journal of Pragmatics 218 (2023) 62e70

patterning. Therefore, Section 2 provides some more detailed background on DPM there based on available grammars and
research, from which we developed our functional categorisation (Section 3).

2. There: detailed background and functions

Within the larger grammars of English, the properties of there have been described mostly in terms of its existential and
locative uses, with attention given to its idiomatic uses, such as there you are (¼ this is for you/ ¼ this supports or proves what
I have said) (Quirk et al., 1985: 523), its pro-form use (ibid.), and its use in certain formal contexts, notably meetings and
interviews, to mark an end point of conversation: and there we must leave it (Carter and McCarthy, 2006: 95). Biber et al.
(1999: 948) note that the distribution of existential there is relatively stable across the register-types they compare (con-
versation, fiction, news and academic), while locative there is more frequent in the conversation and fiction register-types,
indicating the shared spatial context (actual or fictional) that characterise them. Studies of the historical development of
there have mostly focused on processes of grammaticalisation and subjectification of existential there (e.g., Breivik 1981, 1990,
2005), its diachrony (e.g. Nagashima, 1972), and the pragmaticesemantic relation of existential there and locative there
(Mitchell, 1985: 625e626; Breivik and Swan, 2000). Alternative uses of there, described as discourse-deictic there (Lenker,
2018) and discourse-pragmatic there (Tagliamonte and Jankowski 2020) have only more recently begun to be described.
We also adopt the term ‘discourse-pragmatic marker’, despite the range of potential alternatives (see for example Brinton,
1996; Fischer [ed.] 2006). This is as a means of acknowledging the range of items potentially comprehended within the
designation, their inherent multifunctionality, and how they can simultaneously encode multiple planes of meaning/function
in interaction. This presents some challenges in terms of analysing and classifying functions in context in a form-to-function
corpus pragmatic approach (see also Section 3) but aligns with our focus on establishing functions in context and the
acknowledgement of simultaneous encoding and layering of functions.
Within the analytical framework of discourse-pragmatic variation, Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2020) describe discourse-
pragmatic there, alongside here, as a robust feature of the samples of language use found in the Ontario Dialects Project. To set
up their discussion of the particular characteristics of here/there in this context, which emphasises their ubiquity, but also
nuances in their use by an informant, they use B.B. who uses here/there fourteen times in under a minute, as an example.

(7) B.B.: You go down there you look at the guys there, they're drilling away there, there's water falling down on top of you- water's way below the side. It's dark,
because the light on, eh? They have another light there just to- there's a light underneath there and that light is connected to the signals. It flashes every time the
signal flashes, so they can tell when the- when the hoist is moving, eh? Or when it's coming down, and there's only one part of the shaft where the- where the bucket
comes down, eh? I guess you stay away from there. But they're there drilling away there with the pluggers there, just wet. And they always drill. Um they'll blast
here and they'll muck out here. They'll muck out and the water will run there and they'll drill up here right? Like- like this? Like the she shaft is- is twenty-four feet
or thirty-feet wide? So fifteen feet he hee blast this out, and muck this out and then they'll drill this side.
Interviewer: Right.
B.B.: Meanwhile we drill this side, the water's gone there, eh?

(Tagliamonte and Jankowski 2020: 218)

Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2020) acknowledge that both here and there could be interpreted spatially throughout, but
the optionality of the majority of uses of there indicates its affinity with the broad class of items they comprehend within the
term discourse-pragmatic deixis. Optionality is obviously a key litmus test for discourse-pragmatic uses more generally (after
Schiffrin, 1987), and Tagliamonte and Jankowski's observation above has particular relevance for the present study where the
optional, locative use of there is subsumed by a purposeful discourse-pragmatic use which functions in intimate discourse as
an involvement marker, creating a sense of immediacy and shared space and time with the addressee, as well as inviting a
non-present listener to share ownership of a relevant, past discursive space. While their approach is quantitative variationist
in nature, and the present paper takes a corpus pragmatic approach, Tagliamonte and Jankowski's work provides substantial
quantitative warrant for the investigation of this DPM function of there is other varieties and contexts.
As part of her discussion of discourse-deictic there, Lenker, (2018) quotes Moilanen's (1979: 187) discussion of the ‘shared
perceptual space’ denoted by deixis, which could be concrete, in a canonical deictic sense, but also abstract. Breivik and Swan
(2000), in their discussion of the desemanticisation of existential there, point out that, in cognitive terms, shades of its original
(concrete) locative reference are present in its designation of a ‘mental space where conceptual entities are located’ (p. 28).
Lenker, (2018) discusses the pragmatic functions of there in Present Day English (PDE) as discourse organisational, which
would fit in with the topicalising function present in example (2). While in Lenker's data, the speaker and hearer are co-
present to access the part of the preceding discourse referenced by there, in the case of (2) above, the speaker is seeking
to involve the current hearer, referring to a point in discourse time for which they were not present. This is a key feature of the
additional functions of discourse-pragmatic there identified in the present study. In PDE, Lenker points out, discourse-deictic
there, as in you are right there, is almost exclusively found in face-to-face interaction of a particular type (TV and radio
broadcasts, council meetings). Building on this argument, we posit that this interactiveness is even more noticeable in the
context of intimate discourse, where linguistic patterns characteristic of close and spontaneous interaction and close re-
lationships with others can be observed.
Corpus consultation suggests that discourse-pragmatic uses of there were already in place in IrE in the nineteenth century
as evidenced in (5). Although, as Lenker, (2018) argues, these uses were only rarely and restrictedly employed up to then,
some of the discourse-pragmatic load of there may have older antecedents. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) allows that

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B. Clancy, C. Amador-Moreno and E. Vaughan Journal of Pragmatics 218 (2023) 62e70

uses of there meaning ‘[a]t that point or stage in action, proceeding, speech, or thought; formerly sometimes referring to what
immediately precedes or follows: at that juncture; on that; on that occasion; then’ (s.v. there, 5) were in place in the 1700s, as
illustrated in example (8) from the Irish author George Farquhar.

(8) Brother! Hold there Friend, I'm no Kindred to you that I know of, as yet. (1706, G. Farquhar Recruiting Officer i. i. 2).

Farquhar's use of there in (8) seems to be related to three earlier examples, (9)e(11), also provided by the OED to illustrate
the same definition, while the ‘invited inference’ (Traugott, 2010: 32) of the temporal meaning is not so evident in examples
(12) to (14), also used in the same OED's entry.

(9) At myn endynge … I pray þe lady helpe me þare. (a1400, Relig. Pieces fr. Thornton MS. 77)
(10) The kynge Arthur Answerys thore Wordys that were kene and throo. (a1450, Le Morte Arth. 2388)
(11) ‘A! false traytor’ he sayd thore. (a1450, Le Morte Arth. 3480)
(12) And euen there his eye being big with teares, turning his face, he put his hand behind him. (1600, Shakespeare Merchant of Venice ii. viii. 46)
(13) And there put on him What forgeries you please. (1604, Shakespeare Hamlet ii. i. 19)
(14) There we are at this instant. (1647, T. May Hist. Parl. i. vii. 76)

The inclusion of examples (11) to (14) in the OED definition might be based on the fact that no definite referent can be
located in an expanded co-text. As Brinton (2017: 24) points out, this type of ambiguity is understood as a ‘bridging’ context
where ‘the form is then expanded to contexts in which the original meaning is no longer salient’ (see also Evans and Wilkins,
2000). This type of bridging reflects a semantic change in the development of the feature and can be conceptualised as related
to what Agha calls functional leakage (1996: 660), which, we contend, captures the nature of the development of there in Irish
English. Discourse-pragmatic markers undergo changes generally associated with grammaticalisation, which include
persistence,3 divergence and layering. A number of syntactic pathways for the development of discourse-pragmatic markers
have been identified which trace their movement from a lexical item to a discourse-pragmatic marker (DPM). Traugott (1982:
255) is often referred to as the first to have suggested this movement: so, for example, has developed from a manner adverb to
DPM. Similarly, D'Arcy (2017) has shown how like transitioned from a preposition to a complementiser to DPM. DPM there in
IrE is not a prototypical case of grammaticalisation, appearing to be more a case of pragmaticalisation, although both pro-
cesses are interrelated (see, however, Degand and Evers-Vermeul, 2015 for a fuller discussion). It follows, however, all the
characteristics identified by Claridge and Arnovick (2010: 179e182) with ‘the resulting output functions in the domain of
discourse, not with the (grammatical) system of a language’ (p. 165). Along the lines of what occurs with other more char-
acteristically IrE DPMs such as sure and grand, there seems to have moved from a non-subjective to an (inter)subjective use in
order to fulfil a number of discourse-pragmatic functions that were not attached to their original uses (see also Hickey, 2017;
Amador-Moreno, 2019: 91e134).4 This paper puts forward for consideration the pragmatic strengthening of there in IrE as
evidenced through its discourse-pragmatic functions, for example, its patterning with specific time references amongst
others. These patterns are discernible using the corpus pragmatic approach outlined in Section 3.

3. Methodology

For the purposes of this paper, LINT is the focal corpus with CORIECOR as a complementary data source. For our corpus
pragmatic approach, the starting point is raw frequency - in LINT, there are 4972 instances of there, though of course this
includes all functions of there including its existential and locative uses, the former of which were anticipated to account for a
large proportion of the occurrences. Given this, and in order to investigate the nature of the functional dispersion of there, 500
randomised occurrences of there from LINT were analysed in detail. Randomisation counteracts selection bias and it is also a
particularly effective method when conducting corpus pragmatics research, where frequency of occurrence as an identifier in
terms of quantitative analysis needs to be combined with a more fine-grained qualitative analysis that allows us to focus on
detail in order to diagnose specific functions. Clancy and Vaughan (2012) adopt a similar approach with the discourse-
pragmatic marker now, where they looked at its frequency across different corpora, noting that the frequency of now was
higher in IrE than, for example, the Spoken BNC1994. In the case of now the frequency difference was attributable to a greater
range of functions for now; therefore, it might be reasonably hypothesised that the ubiquity of there in the upper reaches of
spoken word frequency lists might be due to a greater functional load, such as its enhanced pragmatic functions.
The next step in the analytic process is based on the functional distribution of there in LINT. We have looked at the range of
functions for there in IrE and beyond and the categorisations in Table 1 are extrapolated from the grammars and published
literature discussed in section 2 above, with examples taken from concordance lines generated using LINT.

3
Building on Hopper's principles of grammaticalisation (Hopper, 1981: 22), Brinton (2017: 28) states that a pragmatic marker ‘is never entirely divorced
from its semantic source’.
4
As an aside, it is often the case with DPMs in general that their value is not always appreciated/perceived by a more general language observer, and they
continue to evoke the criticisms of prescriptivists as ‘non-standard’, ‘colloquial’, ‘incorrect’ or ‘stylistically poor’, used to build stereotypes and create
stigmatisation (Amador-Moreno, 2010: 119e123). There in this sense may not have been salient enough diachronically to have received such criticisms or
attracted stigmatisation and stereotyping.

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B. Clancy, C. Amador-Moreno and E. Vaughan Journal of Pragmatics 218 (2023) 62e70

Table 1
Functions of there (examples taken from LINT).

Function Example

Existential There's an awful lot of tourists.

Locative Last year myself and my parents went to Jersey for a week … it's really really nice there.
Fixed phrase I was here and there and everywhere else.
Conversational/procedural Hello hey there hello
Presentative A: Can I have the remote control?
B: There you go.
Quotative He got down on the one knee and he was there “would you marry me?” I was there “Oh my God”.
Discourse-pragmatic He kind of fired them up there for a while.

The functional categories in Table 1 are not absolutes, especially in relation to the division of fixed phrases and conver-
sational/procedural; however, they do facilitate a more fine-grained differentiation between categories as we further explore
them in the findings and discussion section. Obviously, existential and locative there account for the vast majority of oc-
currences in most corpora, but we identify several other categories, including DPM there in interaction with the concordance
lines generated from the raw data, and ultimately the randomised lines. Some of these are straightforward enough and
expected, such as fixed phrases; however, some, for example the quotative use of be þ there, are new to IrE description, and
indeed, other varieties of English. Of note for the categorisation of an instance as locative there, as can be seen from the
example in Table 1, is that the there had to be unambiguous in its reference (cf. Tagliamonte and Jankowski, 2020; see Section
2). This becomes important in looking at instances of what we are calling discourse-pragmatic there.
In order to isolate, in as much as possible, instances of discourse-pragmatic there, it was decided to use CQL to construct a
query to search for there as adverb. In this way, existential there, the most frequently occurring function in LINT was, in the
main, excluded from the results. This CQL query resulted in a total of 2797 instances of there in LINT. The results themselves
were then viewed as concordance lines, and these were reduced to a random sample of 500 occurrences. These instances
were then classified according to their functions, using the categories in Table 1. The concordance lines were categorised by
the researchers individually, and then cross-checked as a team in order to achieve consensus on the designation of categories,
especially given the permeability of DPM functions more generally. As with Clancy and Vaughan (2012), the most prominent
functional layer, along with team agreement decided the categorisation. To identify discourse-pragmatic there we applied a
number of tests e to Schiffrin's (1987) optionality criterion for discourse markers, we added Tagliamonte and Jankowski's
(2020) contention that ambiguous instances of what might be considered locative there are categorised as discourse-
pragmatic there. For example:

(15) Just on Sky News there.

(16) This one now is in Florida until the first week of April and she goes and she has a condo in Florida she rang me there for Christmas to wish me a happy
Christmas.

In both (15) and (16), taken from LINT, there is ambiguous in its reference. In (16), Just on Sky News is a sufficient amount of
information and there seems unnecessary as pointing to the television is, in a sense, redundant as the speakers likely know
that Sky News is a television station. Similarly, in (16) there does not point to where the telephone is located as this is almost
certainly unnecessary in this instance. In both of these examples, there is used to draw attention to an event that has just
occurred e (15) the news of a celebrity marriage, and (16) a telephone call e rather than provide any reference to the location
of the event (see Cairns, 1991). Therefore, and we expand on this more in our findings, these instances, and others like them,
were classified as DPM there. The final test we apply, evident in (15)e(16), is the absence of a prepositional complement.
Prepositional complements, such as over, out or down, often accompany instances of locative there and can result in there
being syntactically obligatory (Tagliamonte and Jankowski 2020). A syntactically obligatory there does not fit the criterion of
optionality; therefore, instances of there with a prepositional complement are excluded in the results presented here.
Applying these tests e optionality, ambiguous reference and the absence of a prepositional complement e enabled us to
identify 54 instances of DPM there (see Table 2) in the random sample of 500 concordance lines in LINT.5 This is the first
evidence we can put forward for an increased functional load on there in IrE.

5
In the early stages of the present study, comparative frequencies were also generated using spoken corpora of other Englishes, for example the Spoken
BNC2014 (see Love et al., 2017). While the normalised frequency comparison was informative - there was more frequent in the IrE data at 6744 per million
versus 6095 per million in the Spoken BNC2014 - there was less to investigate when 500 randomised concordance lines were generated from the latter:
only 3 occurrences of DPM there could be identified.

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4. Findings and discussion

As previously mentioned, with substantial datasets and a multifunctional, high frequency item under the microscope, in
order to focus the analysis while reducing selection bias, occurrences of there were randomised and 500 random concordance
lines for there were generated from the 2797 occurrences generated by the CQL query in LINT. The functional frequency
distribution of the 500 randomised occurrences is presented in Table 2, bearing in mind that the CQL search excluded
existential there.

Table 2
Functional frequency distribution for there in LINT.

Function of there Frequency in LINT

Locative 425
Discourse-pragmatic 54
Quotative 9
Fixed phrase 7
Presentative 3
Conversational/procedural 2

Unsurprisingly, occurrences of locative there dominate the functional frequency. However, the second most frequent
function in the data is DPM there. 54 instances of DPM there were identified in LINT from the 500 concordance lines. A number
of patterns emerged when the occurrences of DPM there were isolated and further analysed. DPM there occurs with a
discourse deictic function as a narrative device (17)e(19) drawing attention to an event that has just occurred, chiming with
the attested examples (1)e(2):

(17) I was watching a film there.

(18) There was a film on there about it.
(19) Who were ye talking about there?

However, DPM there in LINT also co-occurs with a time stamp on 17 occasions, with specific colligational patterning on 15
occasions and in contexts involving food and drink on 10 occasions, and it is these patterns that we now turn our attention to.

4.1. DPM there and time stamp

The time stamping of DPM there is evident in examples (20)e(25) and illustrative of the absorption of temporal reference
by the DPM.6 As per the outlined tests we used for functional classification, there is optional in the sense that the syntactic
structure and semantic meaning is unaffected should the item be removed. However, we argue that should there not be used,
then the interpersonal meaning of the utterance is affected.

(20) Hey [name] did you record anything there over the weekend that we can stick on?
(21) And he wanted us all to stay around there a while ago he didn't know where to get the decorations.
(22) It was inside in the Champion there last week.
(23) Roarin again she knows ya see I was meant to be down with David there today I'd I'd say he's like a bull with a sore hole that's all I was told right left.
(24) I got the job with FAS starting Monday. She rang me there at four o clock.
(25) The government were subsiding them there for a bit weren't they?

Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2020: 228) highlight the use of DPM there as a narrative device ‘critically tied to meaningful
facts in an unfolding story’ which is connected to examples (20)e(25). However, they employ the sociolinguistic interview as
the data collection tool which appears to facilitate longer turn taking and the development of narratives. Turn taking in
intimate discourse is very dynamic with the conversational floor hotly contested, resulting in short speaker turns (Clancy,
2016). The concept of ‘meaningful facts’, then, becomes even more crucial as the speaker does not get much time/space to
develop a turn of any significant length. Instead a speaker has to be brief. On occasion, DPM there facilitates this by allowing
the speaker to create a ‘shortcut’ to a notional, imagined shared conversational space e (23) I was meant to be down with David
there today; (24) She rang me there at four o clock e thus creating an accelerated sense of immediacy and involvement. The
time stamps used in conjunction with there e a while ago, today, at four o clock e further support this sense of immediacy and
involvement. In this sense, there also emphasises the information that the listener should focus on; for example, in (20) the
focus is on what is available to watch on TV, or in (22) the focus is on information that appeared in a local newspaper (The
Champion).
It should also be noted that ‘DPM there þ time stamp’ is evident in example (5) from CORIECOR, as it is in the example
below (26), and so we could consider this a spoken feature of contemporary IrE that has historical precedents.

6
Interestingly, this time stamping is also evident in instances of discourse-pragmatic now in IrE (see Clancy and Vaughan, 2012).

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(26) Miss Malcom had not been well the night before. Mr & Mrs. Barber came there last Sunday night, they intend going home on Saturday. I think Miss Malcolm
looks very ill.
(Mary Craig, Strawberry Hill, Lisburn, to her sister Margaret Craig, ℅ Mrs Sharman, Hollywood, [County Down?], 1st October 1810).

Of course, any conclusions about spoken features such as DPM there in historical sources such as letters should be
approached with a degree of caution, given that private correspondence in this context was a form of ‘speech through
writing’. This means that while they provide a good sense of the use of orality/spoken discourse in intimate spoken con-
versation in the past, these conversations were initiated and sometimes followed (with a considerable lapse of time) in
writing. The study of past forms does, however, facilitate our understanding of present-day discourse-pragmatic features, and
provide a window into processes of language development and change that become significant in our interpretation of DPMs
in contemporary IrE.

4.2. DPM there and colligation

The second frequent pattern that emerged from the instances of DPM there is one of colligation. Examples (27)e(33) all
feature the use of DPM there with imperative structures. This is a similar finding to discourse-pragmatic now in IrE which has
also been shown to co-occur with imperative structures (Clancy and Vaughan, 2012). This discourse-pragmatic now is
distinctive in that it occurs in clause or turn-final position, and so is a backward pointing now. This, in turn, is associated with a
corresponding change in function: clause or utterance final now functions to emphasise or mitigate acts such as imperatives,
requests or suggestions. Of note here, is that there are 160 instances of there now in LINT (see examples (4) and (31)), and,
while we are not suggesting that these are all pragmatic in nature, one of the features of small items that frequently co-occur
in language is that they share similar, often pragmatic, functions (Aijmer, 2002). DPM there also occurs in clause or turn-final
position and, at least in these instances, is a backwards pointing there in that it relates to the co-text that precedes it, rather
than pointing to the space in the wider physical context.

(27) Here hold him there cos he's gonna fall back. I was feeding him a bottle yesterday well he was holdin it himself like.
(28) Give her her bottle there.
(29) Ring Saint Vincent de Paul there and see will they send us down any money.
(30) I haven't a clue look at the papers there and we'll see the paper you read it Eileen is gone to sell the programs.
(31) They should be on other channels English channels. You were supposed to use the video. Go to tv guide there now now go to go to which page is it on?
(32) Turn it off there c'mon.
(33) You can just look out all the windows all the windows bit by bit work away there.

Clancy and Vaughan (2012) argue that discourse-pragmatic now functions either as a mitigator or emphasiser for
imperative structures in IrE. Imperatives often embody a sense of imposition on the hearer; however, in these examples it can
be seen that this is unproblematic in the intimate sphere. We have already argued for the use of DPM there as an involvement
marker, either through the creation of a shared, notional conversational space or through invoking the concept of involve-
ment itself. This use of DPM there as an involvement marker is most clearly evident in the ‘imperative þ DPM there’ structure
in IrE. The imperatives are softened, or alternately boosted, by the presence of DPM there, emphasising that it is the
involvement, and, by extension, the relationship between the speakers, that is important and not the employment of a
potentially problematic structure such as an imperative. As a DPM, there in this pattern emphasises solidarity (‘you are one of
us’). It projects and emphasises involvement and mitigates any potential offence that might have been inferred by the effi-
ciency of the turns in the intimate context.

4.3. DPM there and situational context

The final pattern that is evident in the IrE data is the use of DPM there associated with a particular conversational situation.
While in the LINT corpus participants were recorded watching television together, looking after children or chatting about
their friends and work, there as a DPM appeared to feature more often in conversational situations involving food and drink.
There is, perhaps, a relatively reasonable locative argument for there in examples (34)e(41), but no definite referent could be
located in an expanded co-text; therefore, as per the tests described in Section 3, these instances were deemed optional and
ambiguous and assigned a DPM there function.

(34) I have a lump of pork there actually. Do you want it? Tis cooked like.
(35) Your eggs are in the pot. I made the apple tart fresh there.
(36) Tea is made there right
(37) There's more there if you want more.
(38) There's more there if you want it.
(39) Mm now you'll have to start that on the grammes there.
(40) Do you want a hand there Deirdre?
(41) Has Nana a glass there lads?

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This patterning is consonant with other pragmatic research in IrE in relation to the speech act of offering. This research has
described a complex system of offer, re-offer and modified re-offer associated with food and drink (Barron, 2005; O'Keeffe
et al., 2007; Amador-Moreno, 2010). Similarly, in (34)e(41), there is involved in offers and requests, suggesting a
discourse-pragmatic function rather than a locative one due to the additional relational work such as mitigation that these
strategies often require (see also Section 4.2). In addition, according to Cairns (1991: 26), there can be used to ‘draw attention
to something without making specific spatial reference’. In these examples, attention is drawn to the fact that there is food
available if someone wants to eat (examples (34)e(38)), the weighing scale is on the wrong setting (39), someone is willing to
help out (40) and Nana may or may not have a glass (41). Again, as in the time stamped examples, there is a sense of
immediacy and involvement.

5. Conclusion

In common with many studies on ‘small’ items with pragmatic import in PDE, for example the often-researched item like,
this paper presents evidence for an item's multifunctionality. Traditionally, beyond its ubiquitous existential use, there has
been most associated with a locative use where it functions pragmatically to point to a referent (usually a place) in context. In
line with findings from Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2020) on here/there, we find a blending of spatio-temporal reference in
there. We also argue that the use of there is not restricted to this function but instead, due to the processes of grammatic-
alisation (or pragmaticalisation), there has acquired pragmatic strengthening in the form of additional pragmatic functions.
We have traced the emergence of there as a discourse-pragmatic marker, demonstrating that this function was in place in
earlier English and continues to the present-day Irish English, the focus of our paper.
Using spoken data from LINT and insights from written, though spoken-like, data from CORIECOR, we have shown how a
discourse-pragmatic there facilitates efficient interpersonal communication in a number of ways. In IrE, there has added a new
layer to its spatial properties acquiring an additional temporal element, as evidenced by the accompanying time stamp.
Critically, it provides speakers with a shortcut to a notional, imagined shared space creating an accelerated immediacy and
involvement in conversation and writing. This ‘DPM there þ time stamp’ usage has, we noted, been in use in IrE since at least
the early nineteenth century. We have demonstrated how this involvement function is also present food and drink situational
contexts. Furthermore, it serves to mark the information both listeners and writers should focus on as important or dramatic.
This efficiency and immediacy is further accommodated by the use of there in association with imperatives, the
‘imperative þ DPM there’, to manage the interpersonal issues that might arise when using this potentially pragmatically
problematic structure.
The use of both contemporary and historical sources, viewed through the lens of corpus pragmatics, provides a testing
ground for the synchronic and diachronic analysis of discourse-pragmatic markers at variational level, but also more broadly
in terms of how we understand the scope and use of DPMs. While we acknowledge that this use of there is not exclusive to IrE,
the corpus perspective does add quantitative ballast that allows us to argue for the functional use of a particular marker in IrE.
Further research might be focussed on a comparative functional analysis involving DPM there across different Englishes. In
addition, there is some IrE research to suggest that in the language of intimates the use of discourse-pragmatic markers is
somewhat different when compared to British counterparts (see, for example, Amador-Moreno, 2010; Clancy and Vaughan,
2012; Schweinberger 2015; Vaughan et al., 2017) and this ground could also be extended to other Englishes and other
context-types. While it is not the most frequent function in our sampled data, the identification of quotative there was an
intriguing outcome, and may also be a feature of different Englishes and contexts. The potential of corpora that have already
been the subject of substantial research to yield additional insights when subjected to different research questions, and the
value of spoken corpora for pragmatic research are underscored yet again by the present paper, as are the serendipities and
insights of comparative, collaborative work.

Declaration of competing interest

None.

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

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Brian Clancy is lecturer in applied linguistics at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. His research interests involve the use of corpus linguistics in the analysis
of pragmatic phenomena. 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).

Carolina P. Amador-Moreno is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bergen. Her research interests centre on the English spoken in Ireland
with a focus on historical sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics, but also pragmatics, stylistics, and discourse analysis. She is the author of Orality in Written
Texts: Using historical corpora to investigate Irish English (1700e1900) (2019); An Introduction to Irish English (2010); and the co-edited volumes Irish Identities:
Sociolinguistic perspectives (2020); and Pragmatic Markers in Irish English (2015).

Elaine Vaughan is a lecturer in linguistics, applied linguistics and TESOL at the University of Limerick. Her research interests include corpus pragmatics, Irish
English, and media representations of language, and the use of corpora for intra-varietal, pragmatic, critical and sociolinguistic research. Her published work
focuses on the pragmatics of Irish English, communities of practice in the workplace, and humour and identities in language. She co-edited Pragmatic Markers
in Irish English (2015) and the special issue of World Englishes on Irish English (2017).

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