The study aims to investigate the differences between Taliesin Jaffe and Matthew Mercer’s portrayals of a standard Irish English accent in Critical Role in their respective performances of the character Mollymauk/Lucien. Using previous studies on Irish English pronunciation, the presence of each established feature was investigated to find how authentically the actors succeed to produce the accent. The main features investigated were the rhoticity, plosivization of /θ/ and /ð/, lenition of /t/ and /d/, yod-dropping, diphthongs, and some monophthongs. Using transcripts to locate the instances of said features, the audio of the footage was studied to discover whether the phonemes were produced in accordance with the proposed realizations within Irish English. Both actors were found to excel and struggle with different features, with plosivization of /θ/ and /ð/, lenition of /t/ and /d/, and aspects of yod-dropping proving especially difficult to consistently produce in accordance with supraregional Irish English. The study concluded that neither accent comes close to achieving an authentic Irish English accent and that both portrayals share many similarities with each other, as well as overlapping with the actors’ native General American accent, especially in cases where Irish English and General American shared potential realizations of phonemes.

Tabletop roleplaying games are a type of social, narrative game driven by a group conversation in which a narrative which is co-created by the participants and propelled forward by some mechanical component (for example dice rolls used to determine the narrative outcomes of actions). As mode of spontaneous conversation that has a unique set of specific characteristics, it might be fair to claim that TTRPGs constitute a unique oral genre (or, in conversation analytic terms, a unique speech-exchange system).  One of the most notable characteristics of TTRPGs as conversations is the intensive use of footing shifts. As the players alternate between orienting toward the conversation as players of a game with mechanical components and as co-creators of a joint narrative, various different resources are used to signal what footing a particular turn-at-talk is produced from. Using video from Critical Role, a live-streamed Dungeons & Dragons show, this paper examines the use of footing in TTRPGs and what resources are used to signal these.  The results of the study showed that several different types of footing were used in this material, with a large amount of overlap between them. Though it was possible to identify the primary resources for signalling some of them, for others it was not clear.

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