Of the 13 studies included in this pioneering volume, two acquaint the reader with the research setting regarding the use of English in Ireland and with the particular focus of this project. In the first, “Irish English: A focus on language in action”, the editors specify that the volume is designed to fill a gap – since existing empirical studies on the pragmatics of Irish English are few and of recent date (starting in the late 1990s), unlike the investigation of this diatopic variety on various linguistic levels, the history of which reaches back into the 18th century and is synthetically presented in the second introductory study, Raymond Hickey's “Irish English in the context of previous research”. The other 11 studies are divided into three sections, devoted to pragmatic aspects of Irish English in the private sphere, in the official sphere, and in the public sphere, respectively.

Each of these articles focuses on a different aspect of “language in action”: silence and mitigation in Irish discourse (Kallen), discourse markers (Amador Moreno), responding to thanks in Ireland, England and the USA (Schneider), politeness strategies in family discourse (Clancy), relational strategies in an academic environment (Farr), indirectness in business negotiation (Cacciaguidi-Fahy & Fahy), politeness for sale in Southern Irish service encounters (Binchy), question forms in an Irish radio phone-in (O'Keefe), and a relevance approach to Irish-English advertising (Kelly-Holmes). In each case, though in different proportions, the corpus-based empirical approach is preceded by an overview of the existing literature. This directs the reader to fundamental studies in pragmatics and in the related disciplines linguistic pragmatics draws on, such as linguistics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology, as well to interdisciplinary approaches identified by a diversity of labels such as sociolinguistics, variationist linguistics, discourse analysis, systemic-functional linguistics, speech act theory, language contact studies, studies in cross-cultural and intercultural (mis)communication, studies of second language acquisition, and postcolonial studies. By acknowledging the sources providing the theoretical framework for their own investigations, by defining and manipulating a variety of concepts from different sources, and by critically evaluating previous works on the particular topics of this volume, each of the authors offers researchers and students in pragmatics an invaluable frame of reference and generous suggestions for future approaches.

As for the empirical part of each article, these are based on corpora of varying sizes and origins: questionnaires and interviews designed by the authors, other interviews and surveys, radio broadcasts, audio recordings using concealed microphones, and segments from the L-CIE (Limerick Corpus of Irish English). Various methods of qualitative and quantitative assessment are used in relation to a wide range of topics, and yet the volume appears as relatively homogeneous through this common effort of examining the use of Irish English as a reflection of sociocultural norms, detected in intra- and intercultural interaction. Certain studies reach the point of putting forward testable hypotheses (such as indirectness) at the macro-social level; others state the necessity of including broader segments in the population samples before reaching more general conclusions; together, they cover a wide range of pragmatic phenomena in a multitude of perspectives and contribute to outlining possible directions of “variational pragmatics” (Schreider & Barron) in the study of English as a pluricentric language.