Abstract
This article examines negation patterns with the auxiliaries BE, HAVE, WILL and WOULD in early Irish English through a diachronic study of emigrant letters from the eighteenth century. Irish English is still an understudied variety and, by examining it historically, this study adds new insights into the development of NEG/AUX contraction at an early stage of Irish English. The study looks at contexts in which negative-contracted, auxiliary-contracted and full forms could be used interchangeably, thus emphasising the writers’ individual choices. Social variables such as geographical origin and social rank are reconstructed through the letters’ contents and thus allow sociolinguistic research as well. The article challenges the assumption that may arise from the relatively scarce literature on NEG/AUX contraction in Irish English that AUX contraction, especially with WILL, was a characteristic of early Irish English discourse. It rather shows that NEG contraction was the preferred form among the letter writers.
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Notes
- 1.
The term Ulster refers to the counties Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, Monaghan and County Tyrone, and is not to be confused with today’s Northern Ireland.
- 2.
Cf. Raymond Hickey, Dublin English. Evolution and Change (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005), 151–56.
- 3.
Patrick Fitzgerald, and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 128.
- 4.
Ibid., 122.
- 5.
Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR). Kevin McCafferty and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno (University of Bergen and University of Extremadura, in preparation). The present study is part of the ‘Contact, Variation and Change’ project (CONVAR) at the University of Bergen, Norway (Research Council of Norway grant no. 213245), which is concerned with the emergence and development of IrE over time. The author wishes to thank Kevin McCafferty, Carolina P. Amador-Moreno and the anonymous reviewer for feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
- 6.
The term ‘emigrant letter’ here not only refers to the letters written by the emigrants themselves, but also to letters written by family members and friends to the emigrant.
- 7.
Cf. Douglas Biber, Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 283–300; Michael Montgomery, ‘The Linguistic Value of Ulster Emigrant Letters’, Ulster Folklife 41 (1995): 27; Minna Palander-Collin, ‘Correspondence’, in Historical Pragmatics, eds Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010), 658; Kevin McCafferty, and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. ‘“I Will Be Expecting a Letter from You Before This Reaches You”. A Corpus-Based Study of shall/will Variation in Irish English Correspondence’, in Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe, eds Marina Dossena and Gabriella del Lungo Camiciotti (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012). 183. In Biber’s study (ibid., 288), the degree of orality varies throughout the centuries. According to him, seventeenth-century letters are more involved and oral than eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letters, but they are all less involved than twentieth-century letters.
- 8.
Minna Palander-Collin, ‘Correspondence,’ 658.
- 9.
E.g. Margareta Westergren Axelsson, ‘Contracted Forms in Newspaper Language: Inter- and Intra-Textual Variation’, ICAME Journal 20 (1996): 5–21; and Malcah Yaeger-Dror, Lauren Hall-Lew and Sharon Deckert, ‘It’s not or isn’t it? Using Large Corpora to Determine the Influences on Contraction Strategies’, Language Variation and Change 14, no. 1 (March 2002): 79–118.
- 10.
Ellen M. Kaisse, ‘The Syntax of Auxiliary Reduction in English’, Language 59, no. 1 (March 1983): 93–122; and Goran Kjellmer, ‘On Contraction in Modern English’, Studia Neophilologica 69 no. 2 (1998): 155–86.
- 11.
María del Pilar Castillo-González, ‘Uncontracted Negatives and Negative Contractions in Contemporary English: A Corpus-Based Study’. Doctoral dissertation. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2007. http://dspace.usc.es/bitstream/10347/2328/1/9788497508759_content.pdf.
- 12.
Barron Brainerd, ‘The Contractions of Not: A Historical Note’, Journal of English Linguistics 22 (1989): 176–96; and María José López-Couso, ‘Auxiliary and Negative Cliticisation in Late Modern English,’ in ‘Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed’: New Insights into Late Modern English, eds Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso and Esperanza Rama-Martínez (Bern: Peter Lang: 2007) 301–23.
- 13.
Douglas Biber et al., Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, third edition (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 1129–30; Sali Tagliamonte, and Jennifer Smith, ‘Either it isn’t or it’s not: NEG/AUX Contraction in British Dialects’, English World Wide 23, no. 2 (January 2002): 260; and María José López-Couso, ‘Auxiliary and Negative Cliticisation’, 311–12.
- 14.
Joan Beal, ‘The Grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English’, in Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles, eds James Milroy and Leslie Milroy (New York: Longman, 1993), 199.
- 15.
Bertil Sundby, Anne Kari Bjørge and Kari E. Haugland, A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 1700 – 1800 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), 161; and Kari E. Haugland, ‘Is’t allow’d or ain’t it? On Contraction in Early Grammars and Spelling Books’, Studia Neophilologica 67 (1995): 175.
- 16.
María José López-Couso, ‘Auxiliary and Negative Cliticisation’, 302.
- 17.
Charles C. Fries, American English Grammar (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1940), 8; and Goran Kjellmer, ‘On Contraction’, 159.
- 18.
Michael Swan, Practical English Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 159; and Malcah Yaeger-Dror, Lauren Hall-Lew and Sharon Deckert, ‘It’s not or isn’t it?’, 81.
- 19.
Edgar W. Schneider, ‘Variation and Change in Written Documents’, in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 72.
- 20.
Raymond Hickey, Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 272–73.
- 21.
Apart from Hickey’s study, there have been, to my knowledge, no further investigations that have looked at contraction patterns with be, have, will or would in IrE from a historical point of view.
- 22.
Sali A. Tagliamonte, Roots of English. Exploring the History of Dialects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sali A. Tagliamonte, and Jennifer Smith, ‘Either it isn’t or it’s not’.
- 23.
Lieselotte Anderwald, Negation in Non-Standard British English: Gaps, Regularizations and Asymmetries (London: Routledge, 2002), 47; and Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 93, 273; and Jeffrey L. Kallen, Irish English. Volume 2: Republic of Ireland (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013), 107–108.
- 24.
Lieselotte Anderwald, ‘Negation and Non-Standard’, 47. An example from the corpus is: ‘if I war now in Ereland, I wad ne stay there’ (James Murray, 27 October 1737, CORIECOR).
- 25.
No token of amn’t was actually found in the letters analysed.
- 26.
Kevin McCafferty, ‘Victories Fastened in Grammar: Historical Documentation of Irish English’, English Today 27, no. 2 (June 2011): 19; Kevin McCafferty and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, ‘“I Will Be Expecting’”, 181; and Raymond Hickey, Irish English.
- 27.
Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 13.
- 28.
Joan Beal, ‘The Grammar of Tyneside’, 199; Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (New York: Longman, 1985), 123. Cf. also Michael Swan, Practical English Usage, 159.
- 29.
Lieselotte Anderwald, Negation in Non-Standard, 74–75; and Sali A. Tagliamonte, Roots of English, 89.
- 30.
Ibid. Cf. also Biber et al., Longman Grammar, 1128.
- 31.
Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 272.
- 32.
Ibid. See also Raymond Hickey, Dublin English, 122, 206. Raw numbers supporting Hickey’s claim can be found in Hickey (Irish English, 273), but quantitative findings do not appear to have been published. It should be noted that AUX-contracted and full forms are grouped as one variant as opposed to NEG contraction in Hickey’s survey.
- 33.
Sali A. Tagliamonte, Roots of English.
- 34.
Ibid., 89. Also Kallen (Irish English. Volume 2, 107-108) reports that this feature may be found in present-day Northern Irish English. In contrast to the present study, Tagliamonte only looked at AUX versus NEG contraction. Full forms were not included in her analysis.
- 35.
John Forsythe, Eight Letters from Ireland to John Forsythe the Emigrant with Some Others of Interest and a Genealogy of Four Generations of Forsythes in America (Pittsburgh: 1941); and Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling and David N. Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
- 36.
Mike Scott, WordSmith Tools 6 (Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software, 2012).
- 37.
Furthermore, two instances of hath not and three of thou hast not/had not and has not, respectively, were excluded from further analysis. These are not contracted in my data and therefore excluded.
- 38.
Phonological contexts have so far not been taken into consideration as we are exclusively dealing with written records. However, third-person singular subjects ending in –s would for example inhibit AUX contraction with be in speech due to a phonological clash of consonants.
- 39.
Lieselotte, Anderwald, Negation in Non-Standard, 72–73.
- 40.
Sali A. Tagliamonte, and Jennifer Smith, ‘Either it isn’t or it’s not’, 263; and María del Pilar Castillo-González, ‘Uncontracted Negatives’, 52.
- 41.
Spelling and punctuation are as in the originals.
- 42.
Lieselotte Anderwald, Negation in Non-Standard, 73; María del Pilar Castillo-González, ‘Uncontracted Negatives’, 50–51; José Ramón Valera Pérez, ‘Operator and Negative Contraction in Spoken British English: A Change in Progress’, in The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora, eds Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey N. Leech and Shean Wallis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9; and María José López-Couso, ‘Auxiliary and Negative Cliticisation’, 303.
- 43.
Margareta Westergren Axelsson, Contractions in British Newspapers in the Late Twentieth Century (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 1998), 52, cited by María del Pilar Castillo-González (‘Uncontracted Negatives’, 52); and Bonnie S. McElhinny, ‘Copula and Auxiliary Contraction in the Speech of White Americans’, American Speech, 68, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 372.
- 44.
Goran Kjellmer, ‘On Contraction’, 156; María del Pilar Castillo-González, ‘Uncontracted Negatives’, 53; and María José López-Couso, ‘Auxiliary and Negative Cliticisation’, 304.
- 45.
Margareta Westergren Axelsson, Contractions in British Newspapers, 58ff; cited by María del Pilar Castillo-González, ‘Uncontracted Negatives’, 54; and Goran Kjellmer, ‘On Contraction’, 165, 173.
- 46.
This is: ‘in this Time we Discovered some Burthen opprests her with much relenting her rashness in Leaving her friends to Come to America to Marry a poor man that ant able to afford her a Comfortable Support’ (Samuel Forman, 27 February 1768, CORIECOR).
- 47.
In the analysis, no distinction was made between lexical or auxiliary usage.
- 48.
This is: ‘in this Province she hasnt any Child as yet’ (Samuel Forman, 27 February 1768, CORIECOR)
- 49.
Examples marked with an asterisk are instances that, in spite of the spelling, do not show NEG/AUX contraction.
- 50.
Sali A. Tagliamonte, Roots of English, 89.
- 51.
Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 272–73.
- 52.
Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 272.
- 53.
Sali A. Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith, ‘Either it isn’t or it’s not’, 260.
- 54.
E.g. Doublas Biber et al., Longman Grammar, 1129–30; and Sali A. Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith, ‘Either it isn’t or it’s not’, 260.
- 55.
María José López-Couso, ‘Auxiliary and Negative Cliticisation’, 316–17. However, López-Couso suggests that the nature of the subject is actually less important for the promotion of contraction than the effects of string frequency (Ibid., 320). String frequency has not been considered in the current study.
- 56.
Sali A. Tagliamonte, Roots of English, 89.
- 57.
This table only looks at the decades in which contraction occurs in the letters. The number of tokens is therefore lower than in Table 3.
- 58.
E.g. Sali A. Tagliamonte, ibid., 92; Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 273; and Jeffrey L. Kallen, Irish English. Volume 2, 107.
- 59.
Jeffrey L. Kallen, Irish English. Volume 2, 107. Both counties are relatively close to Ulster.
- 60.
It is unfortunately not possible to give the exact number because some of the letters were written by unknown authors.
- 61.
For some authors additional information was also found in articles and books.
- 62.
Note that the results presented for AUX contraction in Fig. 2 are based on just two Ulster writers and two writers of unknown origin.
- 63.
Raymond Hickey, Irish English.
- 64.
William Labov, ‘The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change’, Language Variation and Change 2 (1990): 205–6.
- 65.
This study refers to the letter writers’ biological sex, either male or female, and not to the social concept of gender.
- 66.
Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 26, 58.
- 67.
Ibid., 25.
- 68.
Table 7 solely refers to the authors included in the analysis, i.e. those who produced relevant tokens.
- 69.
The writers whose social rank is unknown have not been included here.
- 70.
Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 272.
- 71.
William Labov, ‘The Interaction’, 205–6.
- 72.
Ibid., 221. Investigations into different ethnic or religious groups, urban versus rural groups or generational differences are, for the time being, beyond the scope of this study.
- 73.
Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 221.
- 74.
Esther-Miriam Wagner, ‘Challenges of Multiglossia: Scribes and the Emergence of Substandard Judaeo-Arabic Registers’, in Scribes as Agents of Language Change, eds Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwaite and Bettina Beinhoff (Berlin: de Gruyter-Mouton, 2013), 261–75.
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Bonness, D.J. (2018). NEG/AUX Contraction in Eighteenth-Century Irish English Emigrant Letters. In: Villanueva Romero, D., Amador-Moreno, C., Sánchez García, M. (eds) Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66029-5_5
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