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.
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
- 4.1
May in late twentieth-century Irish and British English
- 4.2Irish uses of may
- 4.3Merger/blend/borderline cases
- 4.4
May and prosody
- 5.Discussion
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
O’Keeffe, Anne
2023.
Irish English Corpus Linguistics. In
The Oxford Handbook of Irish English,
► pp. 243 ff.
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