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English World-Wide
Vol. 39:1 (2018) ► pp.60–84

Advanced Dublin English as audience and referee design in Irish radio advertising

The “initiative” role of advertising in the construction of identity

| Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick
This paper examines change in the sociolinguistic landscape of Irish English based on a diachronic corpus of radio advertisements from 1997 and 2007, with a focus on the relatively new accent variety, Advanced Dublin English (AdvD) (Hickey 2013). The quantitative and qualitative analyses are based on Sussex’s (1989) “Action and Comment” framework (which differentiates the advertisement components based on discourse genre) and on Bell’s (1984) audience and referee design framework. AdvD is viewed in the 1997 subcorpus as outgroup referee design where it has an “initiative” role in constructing listener identity. In the 2007 subcorpus, the increased frequency of AdvD suggests that it is evolving to an audience designed style. Stylised representations of this accent can be understood as ingroup referee design, a strategy which facilitates the evolution of this form as audience design. These findings illustrate the initiative role of the media in constructing contemporary cultural identities (Piller 2001).
Keywords: Irish English, Advanced Dublin English, audience design, referee design, media language, advertising language, language ideology, stylisation, authenticity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variation and change in Irish English
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Structure of the ad: Action and Comment
    • 3.2Audience and referee design
    • 3.3The Irish radio advertising context: Sub-varieties of Irish English – audience or referee design?
    • 3.4Audience and referee design in the radio ad corpus
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.11997 subcorpus: Quantitative data
    • 4.21997 subcorpus: Advanced Dublin English as outgroup referee design
    • 4.32007 subcorpus: Quantitative data
    • 4.42007 subcorpus: Advanced Dublin English evolving as audience design
    • 4.5Advanced Dublin English as ingroup referee design through stylisation
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 1 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00003.osu
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