The Limerick Corpus of Irish English: design, description, and application

This paper describes an ongoing corpus development and application project at the Mary Immaculate College and the University of Limerick, Ireland. The Limerick Corpus of Irish English is a one-million-word corpus of English as it is spoken in Ireland. The corpus is genre-based and consists primarily of casual conversational data. Details of the corpus design, development, and applications, both research and pedagogic, are described. An illustrative example of the linguistic phenomenon of HEDGING is explored and some classroom activities based on the findings are developed.