Dr Brian Clancy, Lecturer in Applied Linguistics
Dr Brian Clancy lectures on the MA and Structured PhD programmes in Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature. He is the author of Investigating Intimate Discourse (Routledge, 2016) and Introducing Pragmatics in Use (Routledge, 2011, 2nd ed. 2020), with Prof. Anne O'Keeffe, MIC and Prof. Svenja Adolphs, University of Nottingham. He is the programme coordinator of MIC's new BA in English Language and Literature.
What did you study as an undergraduate and postgraduate?
I did a BA Liberal Arts in the University of Galway. Due to a subject choice malfunction on my part, I graduated with a degree in English and Maths. The following year I completed a Higher Diploma in Education. I quickly discovered that secondary school teaching wasn’t for me, and after some time scratching my head in Berlin, I registered for a Graduate Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) in UL. This was quickly followed by an MA in Applied Linguistics, also in UL. I taught English for a while in a range of different settings before signing up for a PhD in Applied Linguistics in MIC, which I completed in 2010.
Tell us a bit about your research
I’m very interested in spoken language, particularly in how family members speak to one another. One of the most important areas that we sometimes think about least but that matters the most, is politeness. Politeness, for a linguist, is not about speaking with your mouth full or using the right fork at dinner, it’s about the language we use to build and maintain harmonious relationships with one another. I’ve found that family members are polite to one another in a very different way to, say, how they might be polite to people from outside the family group such as friends, classmates or work colleagues. So, one of the things I do is examine the language that characterises politeness in the family. The language of politeness is very different in private settings than it is in public ones, but it is the public settings that we worry most about as the consequences of being impolite to our boss, for example, can be serious. My research shows that we pay a lot of attention to being polite to family members also, even though we mightn’t always think this is the case!
I’m also interested in initial encounters between people and the language we use when we meet each other for the first time as strangers and how this language changes as we become friends (or more than friends). This interest has led me to the reality TV show First Dates (Ireland). At the moment, I’m looking at people on first dates to see if there are linguistic clues as to why people might like to either meet one another again for another date, or not. There are a lot of interesting linguistic aspects to this, including the point in the date when it comes to paying the bill! My most recent work is focussed on how daters create an ‘intimate space’ to talk. This is often done using certain topics of conversation. Same sex couples often share coming out stories, older couples talk about past relationships (daters sometimes call this ‘baggage’ but research shows that baggage is a positive thing in the dating world), and there are also many instances where couples discuss their tattoos. The study of people’s tattoos, referred to as ‘skinscapes’ in applied linguistic research, has shown how sharing tattoo stories is a playful and empowering act for people.
Finally, I do a lot of research on the small linguistic items that appear to make Irish English different to other Englishes, such as British or American English. My primary interests are why Irish people use items such as shur (Shur I don’t know), now (Careful now!) or there (Just missed a call from you there) differently and more frequently than in a lot of other Englishes. I use electronic collections of spoken language, called ‘corpora’, and specifically designed computer software, called ‘concordancers’, that analyses these collections.
What do you enjoy most about undertaking your research projects?
I do a lot of collaborative research with colleagues from other universities around the world. When you work with others, it involves looking at the same thing, say First Dates, from a number of different perspectives. I really enjoy the process of bringing all these perspectives together. This is especially important during the writing process, where working with two or more authors can result in a piece of writing that looks like it was copied and pasted together. The exciting challenge is to create a piece of writing that looks like it was written by one person!
What do you like about supervising a PhD student or Post Doc researcher?
I have PhD students doing a variety of research projects (e.g. the language of newspapers, protest slogans, first year university students) in a number of different countries. What I like most about this is these students consistently challenge my assumptions about how language functions in the real world.
Do you have any advice for someone who is thinking of taking up a postgraduate programme?
The reality of postgraduate study is that when many people begin a postgraduate programme, there are significant time demands in other areas of their lives. You may have a full-time job or a family, for example, depending on your life stage. My advice is to think very carefully about how you will integrate postgraduate study into your everyday life. MIC offers a range of supports to postgraduate students to help with time management, stress etc., and it’s good to familiarise yourself with these before committing to a programme.
MIC’s Meet the Researcher series focuses on the breadth of research output from MIC academics and student researchers.
