Reflection: Speech act types and Irish English

How are speech act types distributed in English? A robust and detailed answer to this question has been provided by John Kirk and Jeffrey Kallen with respect to Irish English. They pragmatically annotated the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (626,597 words in total), thereby creating SPICE-Ireland (Systems of Pragmatic annotation for the spoken component of ICE-Ireland). With over 54,612 speech act annotations, the result is a remarkably rich resource. Regarding speech act types, they revealed representatives and directives to be outstandingly frequent; other speech act types have much lower frequencies. Further, speech act types vary according to text type. For example, representatives are especially frequent in face-to-face conversation, spontaneous commentary and telephone conversation; directives are outstandingly frequent in demonstrations, but also frequent in business transactions, classroom discussion, face-to-face conversation, telephone conversation and legal cross-examination. For more detail, see Kallen and Kirk (2012).