Carolina P. Amador-Moreno

‘[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries . . .putting will for shall with the first person’: the decline of first-person shall in Ireland, 1760–1890

Among prescriptivists, the Irish have long had a reputation for not following the rule requiring a distinction between shall with first-person and will with other grammatical subjects. Recent shift towards will with all persons in North American English – now also affecting British English – has been attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. The present study of data from the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) finds that Irish English has not always preferred will . Rather, the present-day situation emerged in Irish English between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. This important period covers the main language shift from Irish to English, and simplification in the acquisition process may account for the Irish English use of will . In eighteenth-century Irish English, shall predominated. Comparison with other colonial Englishes of the period – US English (Kyto 1991) and Canadian English (Dollinger 2008) – and with north-west British English (Dollinger 2008) shows broadly similar cross-varietal distributions of first-person shall and will . Irish English shifted rapidly towards will by the 1880s, but was not unusual in this respect; a similar development took place at the same time in Canadian English, which may indicate a more general trend, at least in colonial Englishes. It is thus doubtful that Irish English influence drove the change towards first-person will . We suggest the change might be associated with increasing literacy and accompanying colloquialisation (Mair 1997; Biber 2003; Leech et al. 2009: 239ff.). As Rissanen (1999: 212) observes, and Dollinger corroborates for north-west British English, will persisted in regional Englishes after the rise of first-person shall in the standard language. Increased use of will might have been an outcome of wider literacy leading to more written texts, like letters, being produced by members of lower social strata, whose more nonstandard/vernacular usage was thus recorded in writing. There are currently few regional letter corpora for testing this hypothesis more widely. However, we suggest that, in nineteenth-century Ireland, increasing literacy may have helped spread first-person will as a change from below. The shift to first-person will that is apparent in CORIECOR would then result from greater lower-class literacy, and this might be a key to understanding this change in other Englishes too.

He’s After Getting Up a Load of Wind: A Corpus-Based Exploration of be + after + V-ing Constructions in Spoken and Written Corpora

The be + after + V-ing construction is probably the signature construction of Irish English. It has often been used in the portrayal of Irish characters in literature, theatre and cinema. This structure has been widely researched from many different perspectives. Its main function has been described as reporting the conclusion of an action by way of reference to a state initiated by the conclusion of this action. It is also associated with the delivery of ‘hot news.’ Though this Irish (Gaelic)-influenced structure has sometimes been dismissed as stage Irish and outmoded, it is still widely used in contemporary spoken interactions. This paper analyses its use in over 100 hours of naturally occurring casual conversations from around Ireland from the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE), and these are then compared with a smaller corpus of written Irish English which includes literary sources.

Can English Provide a Framework for Spanish Response Tokens

This chapter investigates the question of whether response items in Spanish can be analysed using frameworks developed for the study of similar items in English. Data comes from the Spanish corpus COREC, the Corpus Oral de Referencia del Espanol Contemporaneo, and is compared where appropriate with data from the British English corpus, CANCODE, the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English. The main motivation behind this chapter is to assess the possibility and appropriateness of using English-based frameworks for the analysis of Spanish and to further the notion of ‘good listenership’. To this end, the study scopes out (a) formal aspects of response items in Spanish, (b) pragmatic coverage of the items and their translatability and transferability, and (c) insights into potential cross-cultural misunderstandings with English as the comparison language. We conclude that there is a good but not complete match between English and Spanish, that response tokens are an essential element in being an active and engaged listener in conversation in any language and that fluency is a process best understood in the context of dialogue.

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English: New Methods and InsightsDiscourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English: New Methods and Insights. Edited by PichlerHeike. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 324. ISBN: 9781107055766.

explores the long history of lexicography, differences in prescriptive and descriptive approaches, and current uses of internet and corpus resources; perhaps most important, Word by Word provides a corrective to the notion of “the dictionary” as the supreme authority for “proper” use of language. Stamper vividly elucidates her thesis that “[t] he process of creating a dictionary is magical, frustrating, brain wrenching, mundane, transcendent. It is ultimately a show of love for a language that has been called unlovely and unloveable” (22).

Migration Databases as Impact Tools in the Education and Heritage Sectors

There has been considerable recent investment in the digitization of databases, like the Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration (DIPPAM) project, that relate in various ways to the history and Diaspora of Ireland, which has been an area of intensive scholarship since the later twentieth century (see, for example, Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; O’Sullivan, The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, Vols. 1–6. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Miller, Ireland and Irish America. Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration. Dublin: Field Day Files, 2008). As such resources were largely designed for academics in historical studies and allied disciplines, their applicability as tools to engage public audiences (particularly in the education and heritage sectors) remains to be tested. In this chapter, we discuss how databases like these can be created and subsequently exploited for a much wider variety of academic and non-academic uses by focusing on two related digital initiatives, namely, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) project currently being undertaken at the University of Bergen and Coventry University’s Digitising Experiences of Migration: The Development of Interconnected Letter Collections (DEM) project.

“The More Please [Places] I See the More I Think of Home”: On Gendered Discourse of Irishness and Migration Experiences

One of the main challenges faced by Irish emigrants was the negotiation of diasporic identities and new community forms. This paper sets out to explore the notions of gender and the conceptualization of Irishness in post-famine emigrants’ personal correspondence (1880–1930). Specifically, the study proposes an in-depth analysis of identity nouns such as home and country in order to elucidate the various ways in which the concepts of identity and mobility are interpreted and constructed within male and female discourses. The data for this chapter come from CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty K, Amador-Moreno CP. In preparation. CORIECOR. The corpus of Irish English correspondence. University of Bergen and University of Extremadura, Bergen and Caceres). This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociolinguistics (Chamber JK, Sociolinguistic theory. Revised edition. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, 2009) and corpus pragmatics (Romero-Trillo J, (ed), Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2008; The yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2013: new domains and methodologies. Springer, Dordrecht: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3, 2013; The yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2014: new empirical and theoretical paradigms. Springer, Dordrecht). Methodologically, our study relies on corpus linguistics techniques, namely keyness analysis and concordance lines, to identify the most common collocations and contextual uses of the nouns under study. In the second part of the analysis, the emotional load of these terms is examined from a sociopragmatic perspective in order to explain the way in which letter writers exploit language “to generate particular meanings, to take up particular social positioning” (Culpeper J, Historical sociopragmatics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. 135 pp, 2011:2).

Female voices in the context of Irish emigration: A linguistic analysis of gender differences in private correspondence

The past few decades have witnessed an increasing interest in private correspondence as a source of information for linguistic analysis. Letter collections represent an invaluable source of evidence at a historical and sociological level and, it has been argued, they are also unique sources for the documentation of language development. Recent research has shown how this type of written data can help in analyzing the correlation between social status/gender and language change. Other uses of personal letters have served to document the presence and development of specific syntactic structures. Within the realm of this genre, the value of emigrant letters is enormous, given that they reflect language features that were transported away from the environments in which they initially emerged. This paper takes a bottom-up approach to the analysis of the language of Irish emigrants and concentrates specifically on gender differences in the use of certain linguistic devices. By applying the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics, this study analyses the expression of closeness, spontaneity and solidarity in the use of a few significant features such as pragmatic markers and pronominal forms. The data under investigation is a corpus of letters written between 1844 and 1886 by members of two families who emigrated from Ireland to Argentina. The paper also argues that, given that letter writing is often at the intersection between spoken and written discourse, this type of approach can help us reconstruct the most characteristic properties of spoken discourse in the past.