3.4. Conclusion and outlook

Generally, the survey has proven so far that grand and deadly are used in a particular way in Hiberno-English which differs from standard British English. Both words have apparently gone through a semantic change in Irish-English as they are used with different meanings which are not listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Their developments can be described as somewhat opposed because grand has lost its very positive meaning being downgraded to a mediocre ‘ok’, ‘alright’ whereas deadly has been upgraded to a very affirmative colloquial meaning referring to something ‘brilliant’ or ‘amazing’. Both words can be heard in everyday speech in Ireland, but it seems that grand is of a more neutral register, adequate to any kind of conversation, while deadly is restricted to informal speech. This concurs with the finding that deadly is rather used by young or middle-aged people and grand is not limited to any kind of age group. The final part of the survey has yielded a lot of new ideas for further research on the lexical peculiarities of Hiberno-English.

Besides those new impulses, there are more aspects which need to be considered regarding the study of the specific use of grand and deadly. Firstly, the informants’ personal details have to be analysed to finally get an insight into the influence of social factors. Furthermore, the research methodology needs to be dealt with in more detail, e.g. reconsidering the survey’s structure with regard to its question order. So far, this survey has only shown that a semantic change has taken place, but the difficult question of the “why?” could be raised in the following step. Therefore, the genesis of Hiberno-English has to be examined. Regarding this development, Irish as a contact language needs to be taken into account, just as well as the tense political relations to the British Empire which might have triggered a deliberately marked-off language use. Finally, a corpus analysis of Irish-English texts could be taken into account since the survey is only referring to everyday speech. This analysis could provide further findings on the particular grammatical use and register of grand and deadly to eventually gain a comprehensive understanding of their application in Hiberno English.

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