Echoes of Hiberno-English in The Guard

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the linguistic situation of Ireland by presenting the general features of Hiberno-English, a variety of the English language spoken in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. More specifically, these will be exemplified by considering the Irish film The Guard (2011), set in the west of Ireland. The first chapter briefly presents the history of contact between Irish and English, alongside its linguistic consequences, beginning in the 12th century with the Norman invasion and strengthened by the Tudor conquest and colonisation of the island in the 16th and 17th centuries. By especially focusing on Gaelic substratum influence, the main grammatical and lexical features of Hiberno-English are shown. The film The Guard (2011) was chosen for its cultural and linguistic content as a source of examples of contemporary Hiberno-English. It is an Irish comedy film set in the Connemara region, located in the west of Ireland, where an American FBI agent is sent to work with an Irish officer on a drug trafficking case. In addition to showing the differences between the cultures and language varieties represented by the protagonists, that is American English and Irish English, this context provides an insight into the social situation and the corruption of the Garda, the Irish police force, in rural Ireland. Therefore, the second chapter of this dissertation provides a synopsis of the film by also analysing language choices and their cultural significance, as well as the cultural elements highlighted by the contrasting worldviews of the two agents. The third chapter examines the film The Guard, introduced in the previous chapter, in relation to its linguistic content. Instances of after perfect and clause-final like present in the film are analysed. The after perfect, also referred to as 'immediate perfective' or 'hot-news perfect', consists of a compound verb phrase formed by be + after and followed by a continuous verb form. Although at present it is a resultative perfective generally referring to an action completed in the very recent past, in the early stages of Irish English it had both past and future reference. The pragmatic marker like is frequent in Hiberno-English as it can have various functions such as focusing on a specific piece of information or mitigating the force of an assertion. In particular, clause-final like is the most typical of HE, where it is found more frequently than in other varieties of English.