Cover not available
Part of
Keeping in Touch: Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world
Edited by Raymond Hickey
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10] 2019
► pp. 119–138

Chapter 6
‘I have not time to say more at present’

Negating lexical have in Irish English

Lexical or stative possesssive have has been negated in five ways. Alongside ancient nominal negation (I have no NP) and a newer variant with got (I have got no NP), three verbal negation strategies are found. Bare negation (I have not NP) is the oldest of these, but has ceded ground over the last two centuries to an American-driven innovation using do-support (I don’t have NP) and a British innovation with got (I haven’t got NP). The Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) allows us to study variation and change in the use of these variants from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The analysis shows do-support was added to the Irish English repertoire in this period, but in the early twentieth century it remained rare in Irish English; bare negation persisted as the most robust verbal negation strategy; the got variants occurred only sporadically. Strong maintenance of bare negation and nominal negation with have no indicates that Irish English was a solidly conservative variety in this area of the grammar well into the twentieth century.

Keywords: stative possessive have , negation, do-support, Irish English, Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), personal letters, diachronic change
Article outline
  • 1.More – and less – British than the British themselves: Irish English have negation
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Negation in English: A brief history
    • 2.2Historical accounts of have negation
  • 3.Corpus and data
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Data
  • 4.Results and discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.06mcc
References (44)
Algeo, John
2006 British or American English. A handbook of word and grammar patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carolina P. Amador-Moreno
2010 Writing from the margins: Donegal English invented/imagined. In Robert McColl Millar (ed.), Marginal dialects: Scotland, Ireland and beyond. Special issue of Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ireland 1:52–69.Google Scholar
Anderwald, Lieselotte
2002 Negation in Non-standard British English. Gaps, regularizations and assymetries. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Andor, József
2013 Interrogating possessive have: a case study. Argumentum 9:99–107.Google Scholar
Barber, Charles
1964 Linguistic Change in Present-day English. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Bliss, Alan J.
1979 Spoken English in Ireland 1600–1740. Dublin: Dolmen Press.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K.
2013 English in Canada. In Tometro Hopkins (ed.), World Englishes, volume II: North America, 159–186. London: Continuum International.Google Scholar
Collins, Peter
2015a Diachronic variation in the grammar of Australian English: corpus-based explorations. In Collins (ed.), pp.15–42.Google Scholar
(ed.) 2015b Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
D’Arcy, Alexandra
2015 At the crossroads of change: possession, periphrasis, and prescriptivism in Victoria English. In Collins (ed.), 43–63.Google Scholar
Dollinger, Stefan
2008 New-dialect Formation in Canada: Evidence from the English modal auxiliaries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellegård, Alvar
1953 The Auxiliary ‘Do’. The establishment and regulation of its use in English. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Filppula, Markku
1999 The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fritz, Clemens W. A.
2007 From English in Australia to Australian English, 1788–1900. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 Dublin English: Evolution and change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne
2015  Do-support in early New Zealand and Australian English. In Peter Collins (ed.), 65–86.Google Scholar
Janicki, Karol
2005 Standard British and American English. A brief overview. Copenhagen: Handelshøjskolens forlag.Google Scholar
Kallen, Jeffrey L.
2013 Irish English, volume 2: The Republic of Ireland. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kallen, Jeffrey L. and John M. Kirk
2007 ICE-Ireland: local variations on global standards. In Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl (eds.), Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, volume 1: Synchronic databases, 121–162. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirk, John M. and Jeffrey L. Kallen
2009 Negation in Irish Standard English: comparative perspectives. In Esa Pentillä and Heli Paulasto (eds.), Language Contacts Meet English Dialects. Studies in honour of Markku Filppula, 275–296. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja
1991 Variation and Diachrony, with Early American English in Focus: Studies on CAN/MAY and SHALL/WILL. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith
2009 Change in Contemporary English. A grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCafferty, Kevin
2003 The Northern Subject Rule in Ulster: How Scots, how English? Language Variation and Change 15:105–139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “[H]ushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled”: Writing Ulster English. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Varieties of English in Writing: The written word as linguistic evidence, 139–162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 ‘I am sure you know not what I mean’: Variable negation in late eighteenth-century Irish English. Paper delivered at NPIE 4, New Perspectives on Irish English 4, Bergen 5–7 July 2016.Google Scholar
McCafferty, Kevin and 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 and Máire Ní Chiosáin (eds.), New Perspectives on Irish English, 265–287. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
in preparation. CORIECOR: The Corpus of Irish English Correspondence. Bergen and Cáceres: University of Bergen and University of Extremadura.
Montgomery, Michael
1995 The linguistic value of Ulster emigrant letters. Ulster Folklife 45:26–41.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael B.
2001 On the trail of early Ulster emigrant letters. In Patrick Fitzgerald and Steve Ickringill (eds.), Atlantic Crossroads: Historical connections between Scotland, Ulster and North America, 13–26. Newtonards: Colourpoint Books.Google Scholar
Nelson, Gerald
2004 Negation of lexical have in conversational English. World Englishes 23:299–308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg
2003 Historical Sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Pietsch, Lukas
2008 Prepositional aspect constructions in Hiberno-English. In Peter Siemund and Noemi Kintana (eds.), Language Contact and Contact Languages, 213–236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W.
2002 Investigating variation and change in written documents. In J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 67–96. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Scott, Mike
2013 WordSmith Tools 6. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.Google Scholar
Sullivan, James P.
1980 The validity of literary dialect: Evidence from theatrical portrayal of Irish English forms. Language in Society 9:195–219. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A., Alexandra D’Arcy and Bridget Jankowski
2010 Social work and linguistic systems: marking possession in Canadian English. Language Variation and Change 22:149–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid
1987 The Auxiliary Do in Eighteenth-Century English. A sociohistorical-linguistic approach. Dordrecht: Foris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel
1991 Negation in English Speech and Writing: A study in variation. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter and Jean Hannah
2008 International English. A guide to the varieties of Standard English. Fifth edition. London: Hodder Education.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by 1 other publications

Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E.
2023. “I Thought you had Forgotten me”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Examination of the Mental Verb Think in Irish Emigrants’ Letters. Corpus Pragmatics DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.