Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The Irish Bureau of Military History was established by the Irish Minister for Defence in 1947. Over the subsequent ten years, 1773 witness statements were collected by the Bureau staff. They were given the task of travelling throughout Ireland to gather as much information as possible from those involved in the independence movement. This resulted in one of the largest oral history collections of its kind ever undertaken, comprised of over 36,000 pages of statements. Since becoming available publicly in 2003, these oral histories have been used as valuable sources of historical data relating to the 1916 Rising and War of Independence, but have hitherto not been investigated linguistically. This paper looks at the statements from a linguistic perspective, using methods of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to evaluate their significance as sources of linguistic data. Though oral histories have been investigated from a linguistic perspective, there remains to be a thorough examination of how they can be utilised within the field of narrative inquiry and how that may bridge the disciplines of history and linguistics. This study outlines the potential contribution of oral histories to this field while establishing oral history as a genre of language.