Kevin McCafferty's research while affiliated with University of Bergen and other places
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Publications (19)
The language of letters, especially from lower social strata, may provide some of the best data available for pre-twentieth-century language history from below, because it may accurately represent features of spoken language. To illustrate how much variation – and examples of ‘non-standard’/vernacular usage – may be extracted from letters, this stu...
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 an...
A few lines from Moya Cannon’s poem Our Words distil some of the essence of the evolution of new varieties of English in Ireland:
(1) as the language of conquest
grows cold in statute books,
elsewhere, its words are subsumed
into the grammars of the conquered
I be, you be, he bees.
(Cannon 2007: 16)
As new Englishes developed over the last five cen...
In the English-speaking world, be-deletion, or copula absence, is best known as a likely creole feature of African American English (AAE) and basilectal Caribbean Englishes. This historical case study examines Raymond Hickey's contention that attestations of be-deletion in present-day Irish English (IrE) must lead to revision of accounts assuming t...
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....
In ‘Murdering the language’ Moya Cannon imagines Ireland as a shore washed over by human tides. Each invasion added fresh layers to landscape, community and language, until: […] we spoke our book of invasions –
an unruly wash of Victorian pedantry,
Cromwellian English, Scots,
the jetsam and the beached bones of Irish –
a grammarian's nightmare. (Ca...
This study examines two features of the Irish English literary dialect of William Carleton, a bilingual writer of the period when Ireland shifted to English. It addresses the issue of the validity of literary dialect via empirical comparison of the use of plural verbal -s in Carleton and in personal letters written by a close contemporary from a si...
In diffusionist accounts of the Northern Subject Rule
(NSR), this subject–verb concord system spread from Scotland
via Ulster to North America and elsewhere. Thus, the NSR in Mid-Ulster
English dialects of districts originally settled from England is
attributed to diffusion from Ulster-Scots. But the NSR was also a
feature of dialects of the N...
Citations
... As more people became bilingual in the two languages, and eventually shifted to English, perfect meanings came to dominate. 35 Current literary portrayals of this structure, however, show that the perfect aspect is, indeed, Access to examples of real speech produced by IrE speakers in the past is of course limited, but, as argued above, resorting to written sources can be revealing in that sense. Some of the sources discussed below provide examples of the after construction which lend themselves to comparative diachronic as well as synchronic analysis. ...
... For example, whilst the Proximity Effect is most familiar in relation to pronoun subjects (because they do not otherwise allow for verbal -s), the Proximity Effect should apply to pronouns and NPs alike: the greater the distance between the subject and the verb, the less accessible the subject and the greater the likelihood of verbal -s occurring. Findings from McCafferty (2003) testify to this expectation. McCafferty conducted a multivariate statistical analysis of a collection of nineteenth century letters from Northern Irish immigrants. ...
Reference: Verbal –s in Existential there Sentences
