Reflection: Speech acts across varieties of English

There is a growing body of research in variational pragmatics (Barron and Schneider 2005; Schneider and Barron 2008) that is starting to tease out differences in the ways in which speech acts are performed across different varieties of English (both national and regional varieties). Barron (2005), for instance, has compared the form of offers amongst Irish versus British (specifically, English) speakers of English. In British English, speakers tend to reference the preparatory condition of “desire” (Did you want a cup of tea? or You want a hand?) or ask for permission (Oh, let me help you with that). In Irish English, on the other hand, speakers tend to make “direct offers” via imperatives more often (come in and have a cuppa) and predication-type interrogatives (Will I take you to the hospital?). There is also a higher level of external mitigation of offers through grounders (Would you like me to help you with that, you seem weighed down) and the expression if you like, which allows an explicit “out” for the recipient to refuse the offer.

Other work has focused on request forms, for instance, comparing their occurrence in American English versus British English (Breuer and Geluykens 2007) and British English versus Irish English (Barron 2005). The use of external mitigators to accompany standard conventional indirect requests that arise through referring to standard preparatory conditions, such as the ability to comply, was found to occur more frequently in Irish English compared to British English (ibid.) but, in turn, more often in British English than in American English (Breuer and Geluykens 2007). Syntactic downgrading through negation (I couldn’t get a drink could I?), conditional (Do you mind if I use your phone?) or hypothetical forms (I wonder if you’d be good enough to fax those details over to me?) was found to occur more frequently in Irish English compared to British English (Barron 2005) but, once again, more frequently in British English compared to American English (Breuer and Geluykens 2007). While much of this work has examined pragmalinguistic differences in the performance of speech acts across varieties of English, there is a slowly growing body of work that also examines sociopragmatic differences, as we shall see.