Functions and uses of now in the speech of newcomers to Ireland

The last roughly twenty years have seen a steady rise in research on varieties of English as spoken in Ireland. One line of research that has been particularly fruitful is the corpus-based investigation of pragmatic aspects of varieties of Irish English. While early work in this area dealt with hedging phenomena, more recent research has explored a range of issues such as politeness strategies and relational work in different interactional contexts, the uses, meanings and functions of silence and mitigation, vocatives, different types of questions and discourse markers.