Article published in:
Grammatical Change in English World-Wide
Edited by Peter Collins
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 67] 2015
► pp. 221–246

May and might in nineteenth century Irish English and English English

| Universite de Lausanne
This paper discusses the use of may and might in 19th century Irish English and English English. It builds on Van Hattum (2012a), which found that in 18th and 19th century Irish English might Vinf was used in contexts requiring may/might have Ven in present-day English. This paper aims to find out if this development is due to regional or diachronic variation via a corpus-based study of these modals in 19th century Irish English and English English. The data shows no change in objective possibility contexts, but in subjective possibility contexts might loses the ability to signal past time, and thus requires a perfect to create a back-shifted interpretation of the proposition. Though the data show some small differences between Irish English and English English, generally it seems that the change identified in Van Hattum (2012a) is due to diachronic variation. Keywords: may, might, Irish English, 18th century, 19th century
Published online: 24 February 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.67.10hat
References

References

Coates, Jennifer
1983 The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Condoravdi, Cleo
2002 Temporal interpretation of modals: Modals for the present and past. In Construction of Meaning, David I. Beaver, Luis D. Casillas Martínez, Bradley Z. Clark & Stefan Kaufmann (eds), 59–88. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Demirdache, Hamida & Uribe-Etxebarria, Myriam
2008 On the temporal syntax of non-root modals. In Time and Modality, Jacqueline Guéron & Jacqueline Lecarne (eds), 79–113. Berlin: Springer. http://​www​.springer​.com​/philosophy​/book​/978​-1​-4020​-8353​-2 (5 August 2011) CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Denison, David
1991 Counterfactual may have . In Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change, Marinel Gerritsen & Dieter Stein (eds), 229–256. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
1993 English Historical Syntax. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Dennett, Maurice
1990 The Cherry Valley Chronicles. Letters from Thomas Buckley of Massachusetts to Ralph Buckley of Saddleworth 1845-1875. Saddleworth: Saddleworth Historical Society.Google Scholar
Dollinger, Stefan
2008 New-Dialect Formation in Canada. Evidence from the English Modal Auxiliaries [Studies in Language Companion Series 97]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Facchinetti, Roberta
2003 Pragmatic and sociological constraints on the functions of ‘may’ in contemporary British English. In Modality in Contemporary English, Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug & Frank R. Palmer (eds), 301–327. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Filppula, Markku
1999 The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, David
1994 Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia. Cork: Cork University Press.Google Scholar
Fritz, Clemens
2004 A Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE). Berlin: Free University of Berlin.Google Scholar
2007 From English in Australia to Australian English – 1788-1900. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Tim, Shoemaker, Robert, Emsley, Clive, Howard, Sharon & McLaughlin, Jamie, et al.
2012 The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1913, Version 7.0. www​.oldbaileyonline​.org (24 March 2012).
Huber, Magnus
2007 The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1834. Evaluating and Annotating a Corpus of 18th- and 19th-century Spoken English. Varieng 1. www​.helsinki​.fi​/varieng​/journal​/volumes​/01​/huber (20 March 2010).Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus, Nissel, Magnus, Maiwald, Patrick & Widlitzki, Bianca
2012 The Old Bailey Corpus. Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. www​.uni​-giessen​.de​/oldbaileycorpus (4 July 2013).
Joyce, Patrick W.
1910 English as We Speak It in Ireland. Dublin: Wolfhound.Google Scholar
Kirk, John M. & Kallen, Jeffrey L.
2008 ICE-Ireland. Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast & Dublin: Trinity College Dublin and Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David W.
1979 Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
McCafferty, Kevin & Amador-Moreno, Carolina P.
Under construction. Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR). Bergen, Norway. Crossref
McFadden, Thomas & Alexiadou, Artemis
2010 Perfects, resultatives, and auxiliaries in Earlier English. Linguistic Inquiry 41(3): 389–425. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mezhevich, Ilana
2008 A time-relational approach to tense and mood. In Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference of Formal Linguistics. Natasha Abner & Jason Bishop (eds), 326–334. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Ó Siadhail, Mícheál
1989 Modern Irish. Grammatical Structure and Dialectal Variation. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
OED Online
2012 The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: OUP. www​.oed​.com (22 May 2014).Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank R.
1990 Modality and the English Modals. London: LongmanGoogle Scholar
Sedgefield, Walter J.
(ed.) 1900 King Alfred’s Version of the Consolations of Boethius. Done into Modern English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A.
2000 The grammaticalization of the present perfect. Tracks of change and continuity in a linguistic enclave. In Pathways of Change. Grammaticalization in English [Studies in Language Companion Series 53], Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds), 329–354. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C.
1972 The History of English Syntax. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
2006 Historical aspects of modality. In The Expression of Modality, William Frawley, Erin Eschenroeder, Sarah Mills & Thao Nguyen (eds), 106–139. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Van der Auwera, Johan & Plungian, Vladimir
1998 Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2:79–124. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Van Hattum, Marije
2012a “A cannot get a loan for more than six years now”. The relationship between modal verbs and past time reference in Irish English. In New Perspectives on Irish English [Varieties of English around the World G44], Bettina Migge & Máire Ní Chiosáin (eds), 131–152. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012b Irish English Modal Verbs from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries. PhD dissertation, The University of Manchester.
Visser, Fredericus Theodorus
1969 An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Vol. 3.1: Syntactical Units with Two Verbs. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Google Scholar
Wallis, Sean
2006 ICECUP 3.1. Survey of English Usage,University College London.Google Scholar
Warner, Anthony R.
1993 English Auxiliaries: Structure and History. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wood, Frederick T.
1963 Current English Usage. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria
2011 ARCHER: past and present (1990-2010). ICAME Journal 35: 205–236.Google Scholar