Contact, variation and change: towards an empirical history of Irish English. Diachronic studies of the evolution of an early New English

From about the mid-sixteenth century to 1700 Ireland saw a huge amount of immigration from Great Britain. Beginning around 1700, millions of people have emigrated from Ireland to Great Britain, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and other countries. CONVAR conducts research on Irish English, a variety of English that emerged in part through dialect contact between settlers from different parts of Great Britain who migrated to British colonies in Ireland, and partly via language contact with Irish Gaelic as the Irish gradually shifted from Irish to Irish English. The project is based on data from CORIECOR (the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence), which it uses to study the language of correspondence from the early eighteenth century until around 1940. Many of the corpus letters were written by people with little or no formal schooling, and the language of their letters often reflects aspects of their speech, allowing us to study nonstandard dialects through a period of about 200 years. The project has to date produced research on a number of topics in grammar and phonology. There is a tradition of claims about Irish English that based on little or no empirical evidence. Such claims include the following assertions: - it is claimed that the increasing use of will rather than shall with first-person subjects (I/We will see? heller enn I/We shall see?) has been driven by Irish immigrants, who used will exclusively, - the dramatic rise of the progressive (I am looking?) in the nineteenth century was the result of the Irish using this form more frequently than others and taking it with them when they migrated to other countries and continents, - the Irish tendency to delete the verb be in many contexts (My daughter Ø a teacher), is said to have contributed to this phenomenon in other varieties of English, like African American English and creole varieties of the Caribbean, - Irish English use of the discourse marker sure is said to be the origin of the particularly North American use of this particle. Some of these claims we have been able to confirm: growing use of the progressive, for instance, may well be due to the influence of Irish English on other varieties. But CONVAR generally produces quantitative studies of developments over time that show a much more detailed picture. For example, copula and auxiliary be is deleted according to a totally different pattern in Irish English than in, e.g., African American English, and Irish English is unlikely to have contributed much to be-deletion in African American English. And claims that shall has never been used in Ireland can be shown to be completely off the mark: will replaced shall only in the nineteenth century. A general pattern that emerges is that linguistic features that can be traced back to the influence of Irish on Irish English can be documented and are more frequently used from the early nineteenth century onwards. Further reading The progressive in Irish English McCafferty, Kevin & Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. 2012. CORIECOR: a Corpus of Irish English Correspondence. Compiling and using a diachronic corpus to study the evolution of Irish English. In Bettina Migge & Máire Ní Chiosáin (eds.), New Perspectives on Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 265?287. On shall/will variation McCafferty, Kevin & Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. 2012. ?I will be expecting a letter from you before this reaches you?. Studying the evolution of a new-dialect using a Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR). In Marina Dossena & Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti (eds.), Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 179?204. McCafferty, Kevin & Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. 2014. ?[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. English language and linguistics 18(3):407?429. On be-deletion McCafferty, Kevin. 2014. ?I dont care one cent what Ø goying on in great Britten?: Be-deletion in Irish English. American speech 89(4). On the be-perfect McCafferty, Kevin. 2014. ?[W]ell are you not got over thinking about going to ireland yet?: the BE-perfect in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish English. In Marianne Hundt (ed.), Late Modern English syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 333?351. On discourse marker sure McCafferty, Kevin and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. In press. ?[B]ut sure its only a penny after all?: Irish English discourse marker sure (with Carolina P. Amador-Moreno). In Marina Dossena (ed.), Proceedings of LModE5, the Fifth Conference on Late Modern English, Bergamo, 28?30 August 2013. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

CONVAR applies theories and methods from grammaticalisation theory, corpus linguistics, contact linguistics (dialect and language contact), and historical sociolinguistics, and uses data from the CORIECOR corpus to study the following phenomena empiricall y (cf. details in project proposal): 1. 'Aspect in Irish English' 2. 'The Irish English contribution to the emergence of new varieties of English in North America and the southern hemisphere' 3. 'Dialect divergence in Late Modern Irish English' 4 . 'Discourse markers in Irish English' These focus on koinéisation as a result of contact in Ireland between Englishes imported from GB, language contact with Irish, and the influence of language universals in a situation of language contact and langua ge shift. While certain topics within these broad areas have been studied before, none has been thoroughly investigated on the basis of diachronic data from the entire period covered here. The four projects dovetail with one another and invite collaborati on between the researchers involved. This will amount to the most detailed historical account of IrE to date, the only one based entirely on a large data set, and a valuable contribution to the study of New Englishes within the field of World Englishes, g iven that IrE is (one of) the earliest overseas varieties of English and has been a major contributor of English-speaking migrants to all the other main overseas varieties that have emerged since the seventeenth century.