1 Introduction
Historically, the advent of the English language in Ireland came with the Anglo-Normans and their English-speaking followers in the late twelfth century. They were concentrated in the south-east of the island but, in time, mingled with the Irish population and became Irish-speaking. Hence, English had a rather weak position in medieval Ireland. The situation first changed with the so-called Flight of the Earls in 1607, and the subsequent influx of English and Scottish immigrants to the northern province of Ireland, Ulster.1 The spread of the English language continued with the Cromwellian settlements after 1649/1650 and continuously spread throughout the following centuries.2 The time period studied in this article (1701–1800) thus covers one of the earliest centuries in which a great part of the originally Irish-speaking population in Ireland became English-speaking. In addition, it also includes a time in which political, religious and economic (e.g. famines in 1728–1729 and 1740–1741) problems led to mass emigration.3 From the seventeenth century onwards, millions of Irish people left the country and sought their luck elsewhere. Many of the early emigrants left for North America or the Caribbean (the latter primarily after 16504) and the former was certainly the country that received most Irish emigrants throughout the following centuries. However, some nineteenth-century emigrants also went to Argentina or headed towards the southern hemisphere. In order to stay in contact with their loved ones, families and friends, they had to learn how to read and write letters. Some of these letters have been collected in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), of which a subset is used as the basis for the present investigation of negation patterns in early Irish English (henceforth IrE).5
CORIECOR currently consists of about 6500 letters (approximately 4 million words), of which 4800 stem from the Irish Emigration Database (IED) in Omagh, Co. Tyrone in Northern Ireland. In 2013, 1694 letters were added from other published versions. The majority of the documents are personal letters written by Irish emigrants and their families between the late seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries.6 Personal letters are commonly regarded as relatively close to vernacular speech, often reflecting more dialectal speech types,7 and contraction is one of the features that has been observed to occur frequently in personal letters. Pallander-Collin, for example, notes that contractions, alongside features such as first- and second-person pronouns, that deletion, present-tense verbs or hedges are typically found in ‘oral or ‘involved’ categories’ such as personal letters.8 The letters contained in the CORIECOR corpus are therefore considered well suited for a diachronic study on contraction and negation patterns in early IrE.
Negation has in recent decades attracted the attention of researchers and has been investigated from different angles. Some have focused on contracted forms in different registers,9 while others have investigated restrictions on the use of contraction.10 Castillo-González’s study is an international comparison of NEG/AUX contraction in British, American, Australian and New Zealand English.11 Historical investigations of contraction patterns are rare, but Brainerd, for example, looks at the historical development of NEG contraction in literary texts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and López-Couso investigates conditioning factors fo...