Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 221-231). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The habitual aspect has been a feature of Irish English for centuries. How it has evolved may have had a lot to do with contact between Standard English and the Celtic language, Irish, spoken in Ireland. As time passes does the impact which these two languages have had on each other weaken? How has a major feature of Irish English, the habitual aspect, fared in the digital world? This essay executes some digital detective work and finds that habitual markers do be always there…

The thesis provides a corpus-based study of the development of Irish English modal verbs from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries in comparison to mainland English. More precisely, it explores the morpho-syntax of CAN, MAY, MUST, SHALL and WILL and the semantics of BE ABLE TO, CAN, MAY and MUST in the two varieties. The data of my study focuses on the Kildare poems, i.e. fourteenth-century Irish English religious poetry, and a self-compiled corpus consisting of personal letters, largely emigrant letters, and trial proceedings from the late seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The analysis of the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries is further compared to a similar corpus of English English. The findings are discussed in the light of processes associated with contact-induced language change, new-dialect formation and supraregionalization. Contact-induced language change in general, and new-dialect formation in particular, can account for the findings of the fourteenth century. The semantics of the Irish English modal verbs in this century were mainly conservative in comparison to English English. The Irish English morpho-syntax showed an amalgam of features from different dialects of Middle English in addition to some forms which seem to be unique to Irish English. The Irish English poems recorded a high number of variants per function in comparison to a selection of English English religious poems, which does not conform to predictions based on the model of new-dialect formation. I suggest that this might be due to the fact that the English language had not been standardized by the time it was introduced to Ireland, and thus the need to reduce the number of variants was not as great as it is suggested to be in the post-standardization scenarios on which the model is based. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland, increased Irish/English bilingualism caused the formation of a second-language (L2) variety of English. In the nineteenth century the bilingual speakers massively abandoned the Irish language and integrated into the English-speaking community. As a result, the varieties of English as spoken by the bilingual speakers and as spoken by the monolingual English speakers blended and formed a new variety altogether. The use of modal verbs in this new variety of Irish English shows signs of colonial lag (e.g. in the development of a deontic possibility meaning for CAN). Additionally, the subtle differences between BE ABLE TO and CAN in participant-internal possibility contexts and between epistemic MAY and MIGHT in present time contexts were not fully acquired by the L2 speakers, which resulted in a higher variability between the variants in the new variety of Irish English. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the use of modal verbs converged on the patterns found in English English, either as a result of linguistic accommodation in the case of informants who had migrated to countries such as Australia and the United States, or as a result of supraregionalization in the case of those who remained in Ireland.

The study aims to investigate the differences between Taliesin Jaffe and Matthew Mercer’s portrayals of a standard Irish English accent in Critical Role in their respective performances of the character Mollymauk/Lucien. Using previous studies on Irish English pronunciation, the presence of each established feature was investigated to find how authentically the actors succeed to produce the accent. The main features investigated were the rhoticity, plosivization of /θ/ and /ð/, lenition of /t/ and /d/, yod-dropping, diphthongs, and some monophthongs. Using transcripts to locate the instances of said features, the audio of the footage was studied to discover whether the phonemes were produced in accordance with the proposed realizations within Irish English. Both actors were found to excel and struggle with different features, with plosivization of /θ/ and /ð/, lenition of /t/ and /d/, and aspects of yod-dropping proving especially difficult to consistently produce in accordance with supraregional Irish English. The study concluded that neither accent comes close to achieving an authentic Irish English accent and that both portrayals share many similarities with each other, as well as overlapping with the actors’ native General American accent, especially in cases where Irish English and General American shared potential realizations of phonemes.

This study will explore to what extent familiarity with English accents can influence compulsory school students’ attitudes towards them. Data from questionnaires completed by 98 students were analysed. The results show that the degree of familiarity with the English accent seems to affect the attitude attributed to it. More specifically, the results indicate that a higher degree of familiarity influences the ability to express an attitude. A lower degree of familiarity leads to similar attitudes being given to the accents, which shows a lack of differentiation between them. The results also indicate a bias towards RP. While it is not necessarily harmful, teachers should be aware of this and how their own teaching may influence how different accents are perceived. It is argued that teachers need to intervene in the process of stereotyping which will help develop an awareness of students’ language attitudes. To summarize, it is difficult to draw any wide conclusions from these results due to the study’s scope. Furthermore, the target group is not representative of Swedish compulsory school students as students from the chosen school generally finish with an above-average final grade. Further research is necessary to determine more specifically how familiarity affects attitudes of English accents and if these findings recur in other areas of Sweden where the final grade average is lower.

Ce travail interroge les relations entre langue écrite et langue orale et les effets de la représentation de l’oralité et du dialecte dans l’écriture littéraire. Plus spécifiquement, il établit un cadre théorique d’analyse stylistique permettant de faire émerger la poétique du parler populaire dans l’œuvre de Barrytown de Roddy Doyle. Cette étude s’articule autour de trois chapitres. Les deux premiers sont à visée théorique, et ont pour objectif de mettre en place les outils stylistiques, linguistiques et littéraires à partir desquels l’étude du corpus est abordée. Ainsi, après un retour diachronique et synchronique sur les rapports qu’entretiennent les deux media de communication orale et écrite, nous établissons un cadre d’analyse stylistique de la représentation de l’oralité et du dialecte dans la littérature. Nous étudions ensuite cette problématique plus spécifiquement dans le contexte irlandais, puisque la littérature et la culture irlandaises sont marquées par un la tradition orale. Cela nous conduit à une description détaillée du dialecte anglais-irlandais sous l’angle de la grammaire, du lexique et de l’accent. Nous abordons enfin les effets de la représentation de l’oralité et de l’irlandité dans l’œuvre barrytownienne de Roddy Doyle et faisons émerger la poétique du parler populaire qui l’anime. / This study focuses on the relations between spoken and written language and on the effects created by the representation of orality and dialect in literary writing. More specifically, it proposes a theoretical framework of stylistic analysis which allows for the study of the poetics of popular language in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown novels. This study is divided into three chapters. The first two chapters aim to define the stylistic, linguistic and literary tools that are used in the third chapter in order to carry out the corpus analysis. This study starts with a diachronic and a synchronic overview of the relationship between the oral and written media of communication. A workable framework for the stylistic analysis of the representation of orality and dialect in literature is then established. The second chapter considers this issue in an Irish context. Indeed, a strong oral tradition has always been present in Ireland and its impact is still felt in literature and culture. The linguistic situation in Ireland is studied from the point of view of grammar, lexicon and accent. Finally, the third chapter applies the framework previously presented and explores the effects created by the representation of orality and Irishness in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown novels. It finally exposes the poetics of popular language.