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Part of
Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English
Edited by Sandra Jansen and Lucia Siebers
[Studies in Language Variation 21] 2019
► pp. 183–202

Chapter 10
The modal auxiliary verb may and change in Irish English

This paper presents an analysis of the modal auxiliary verb may using data from the International Corpus of English: Ireland Component (the ICE-Ireland Corpus and from other corpora for comparison. The analysis is focused on the semantic functions of may, especially root and epistemic uses. The analysis shows that root uses of may predominate overall but epistemic uses predominate in spoken data, in both parts of Ireland. It uncovers a further instance of mild obligation may, which may be considered an Irishism.

Keywords: may , modal auxiliary verb, root, epistemic, corpora, ICE-Ireland, ICE-GB, standardised English, spoken and written varieties
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research questions
    • 2.1Corpus data
    • 2.2ICE-Ireland
    • 2.3ICE-GB
    • 2.4London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English (LLC)
    • 2.5Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR)
    • 2.6Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB)
    • 2.7Freiburg Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (FLOB)
    • 2.8The British National Corpus (BNC)
  • 3.Background
    • 3.1Modal verb system of Irish
    • 3.2Development of may in the History of English
    • 3.3Descriptive model of may
  • 4.May in nineteenth-century Ireland
    • 4.1May in late twentieth-century Irish and British English
    • 4.2Irish uses of may
    • 4.3Merger/blend/borderline cases
    • 4.4May and prosody
  • 5.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.21.10kir
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