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ϋẹẲặẴẾẳΝẬẹẲỀẬẲẰΝẬẹắΝẴẹẲỀẴẾếẴẮẾڷۦۣۚڷ۪ۧۙۗۦۙۧڷ۠ٷۣۢۨۘۘۆ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃۧۨۦۙ۠ٷڷ۠ٷۡٮ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃۣۧۢۨۤۦۗۧۖ۩ۑ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃۧۨۢۦۤۙۦڷ۠ٷۗۦۣۙۡۡӨ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃڷۙۧ۩ڷۣۚڷۧۡۦۙے
ۧۙۦٷ۠۩ٷڷۙۧۙۜۨڷۢڷۺۨ۠۩ۗںۚۘڷۜۗ۩ۡڷۘۢںڷۓۜۧۦٲڷۙۜےۑڰ
ۣۚڷۙۢ۠ۗۙۘڷۙۜۨڷۃڱۣۢۧۦۙۤڷۨۧۦںڷۙۜۨڷۜۨ۫ڷẾẳẬặặڷۦۣۚڷỂẴặặڷۛۢۨۨ۩ۤғڷғڷғ
ڼۂہڽڬڼڿۀڽڷۃۘۢٷ۠ۙۦٲڷۢڷẾẳẬặặڷۣۢۧۦۙۤۧۨҒۦں
ۍІٮېۍیҒېۍөۆیۆڷғێڷۆІٲۋۍېۆӨڷۘۢٷڷﯦےېٮٯٯۆۗӨیڷІٲ۔ٮۊ
ۂھۀڷҒڷۀڼۀڷۤۤڷۃۀڽڼھڷۦ۪ۣۙۖۡۙІڷҖڷڿڼڷۙ۩ۧۧٲڷҖڷہڽڷۙۡ۩ۣ۠۔ڷҖڷۧۗۨۧ۩ۛۢۋڷۘۢٷڷۙۛٷ۩ۛۢٷۋڷۜۧ۠ۛۢٮ
ۀڽڼھڷۦۣۙۖۨۗۍڷہھڷۃۣۙۢ۠ۢڷۘۙۜۧ۠ۖ۩ێڷۃڼڼڽڼڼڼۀڽڿۀۀڿڼڿڿڽۑҖۀڽڼڽғڼڽڷۃٲۍө
ڼڼڽڼڼڼۀڽڿۀۀڿڼڿڿڽۑٵۨۗٷۦۨۧۖٷۛҖۦۣۘۛۙғۦۖۡٷۗ۠ۧғٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞ҖҖۃۤۨۨۜڷۃۙ۠ۗۨۦٷڷۧۜۨڷۣۨڷ۟ۢۋ
ۃۙ۠ۗۨۦٷڷۧۜۨڷۙۨۗڷۣۨڷۣ۫ٱ
ۜۗ۩ۡڷۘۢںڷۓۜۧۦٲڷۙۜےۑڰڷғۀۀڽڼھڿڷۍІٮېۍیҒېۍөۆیۆڷғێڷۆІٲۋۍېۆӨڷۘۢٷڷﯦےېٮٯٯۆۗӨیڷІٲ۔ٮۊ
ۣۢۧۦۙۤۧۨҒۦںڷۣۚڷۙۢ۠ۗۙۘڷۙۜۨڷۃڱۣۢۧۦۙۤڷۨۧۦںڷۙۜۨڷۜۨ۫ڷẾẳẬặặڷۦۣۚڷỂẴặặڷۛۢۨۨ۩ۤғڷғڷғڷۧۙۦٷ۠۩ٷڷۙۧۙۜۨڷۢڷۺۨ۠۩ۗںۚۘ
ҖۀڽڼڽғڼڽۃۣۘڷۂھۀҒۀڼۀڷۤۤڷۃہڽڷۃۧۗۨۧ۩ۛۢۋڷۘۢٷڷۙۛٷ۩ۛۢٷۋڷۜۧ۠ۛۢٮڷғڼۂہڽڬڼڿۀڽڷۃۘۢٷ۠ۙۦٲڷۢڷẾẳẬặặ
ڼڼڽڼڼڼۀڽڿۀۀڿڼڿڿڽۑ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃڷۣۧۢۧۧۡۦۙێڷۨۧۙ۩ۥۙې
ۀڽڼھڷ۪ۣІڷڼڿڷۣۢڷۀۂڽғڽҢھғڿҢڽғۂۀڷۃۧۧۙۦۘۘٷڷێٲڷۃۋۋٮۛҖۦۣۘۛۙғۦۖۡٷۗ۠ۧғٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞ҖҖۃۤۨۨۜڷۣۡۦۚڷۘۙۘٷۣۣ۠ۢ۫ө
C Cambridge University Press 2014
English Language and Linguistics 18.3: 407–429.
doi:10.1017/S1360674314000100
‘[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries . . . putting
will for shall with the first person’: the decline of first-person
shall in Ireland, 1760–18901
K E V I N M CC A F F E R T Y
University of Bergen
and
C A R O L I N A P. A M A D O R - M O R E N O
University of Extremadura
(Received 4 October 2012; revised 2 July 2013)
Among prescriptivists, the Irish have long had a reputation for not following the rule
requiring a distinction between shall with first-person and will with other grammatical
subjects. Recent shift towards will with all persons in North American English – now also
affecting British English – has been attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. The
present study of data from the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR)
finds that Irish English has not always preferred will. Rather, the present-day situation
emerged in Irish English between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. This
important period covers the main language shift from Irish to English, and simplification
in the acquisition process may account for the Irish English use of will.
In eighteenth-century Irish English, shall predominated. Comparison with other
colonial Englishes of the period – US English (Kytö 1991) and Canadian English
(Dollinger 2008) – and with north-west British English (Dollinger 2008) shows broadly
similar cross-varietal distributions of first-person shall and will. Irish English shifted
rapidly towards will by the 1880s, but was not unusual in this respect; a similar
development took place at the same time in Canadian English, which may indicate a
more general trend, at least in colonial Englishes. It is thus doubtful that Irish English
influence drove the change towards first-person will.
We suggest the change might be associated with increasing literacy and accompanying
colloquialisation (Mair 1997; Biber 2003; Leech et al. 2009: 239ff.). As Rissanen
(1999: 212) observes, and Dollinger corroborates for north-west British English, will
persisted in regional Englishes after the rise of first-person shall in the standard language.
Increased use of will might have been an outcome of wider literacy leading to more
written texts, like letters, being produced by members of lower social strata, whose
more nonstandard/vernacular usage was thus recorded in writing. There are currently few
regional letter corpora for testing this hypothesis more widely. However, we suggest that,
in nineteenth-century Ireland, increasing literacy may have helped spread first-person will
as a change from below. The shift to first-person will that is apparent in CORIECOR would
then result from greater lower-class literacy, and this might be a key to understanding this
change in other Englishes too.
1
Title from Fogg (1796, vol. II: 129; cited in Sundby, Bjørge & Haugland 1991: 191). This view is also reflected
in the title of Molloy (1897): The Irish difficulty, shall and will (1897). This work was previously funded by the
University of Bergen’s Meltzer Foundation (Grant No. 9334, 2008–09) and is currently funded by the Research
Council of Norway (Grant No. 213245, 2012–15).
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1 Shall/will variation in Irish English?
Why study variation between first-person shall and will in Irish English (IrE)? As
Hickey observes (2007: 179), accounts are unanimous that shall is virtually nonexistent in this variety, and there is solid empirical support for this in studies of
twentieth-century IrE (Corrigan 2000: 37; Kallen & Kirk 2001: 71–3). Moreover,
commentators from the last two centuries condemn the Irish inability to use shall
and will ‘correctly’ (Beal 2004: 96f.; Hickey 2007: 179). Hence, the present situation
seems to have emerged by the mid eighteenth century (see Sundby et al. 1991: 190–2,
392). Later commentaries on IrE confirm the persistence of first-person will through
the nineteenth century (e.g. Biggar 1897: 46f.; Molloy 1897), into the twentieth (Joyce
1988 [1910]: 74–6; Taniguchi 1972 [1956]: 53), and down to the present (e.g. Harris
1993: 158; Dolan 2006: xxv–xxvi; Amador-Moreno 2010a: 44f.; Corrigan 2010: 64f.).
It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that shall has never been used in IrE.
The above might support claims that IrE usage promoted replacement of firstperson shall by will in other varieties, rather than maintaining the distinction originally
described by seventeeth-century grammarians (e.g. Mason 1905 [1622]; Wallis 1972
[1653]).2 Today, in spite of long-lived normative pressure to preserve the distinction,
the decline of shall is reported in North American English (NAmE) and British English
(BrE) alike, with the former assumed to be influencing the latter (e.g. Mair 2006: 100ff.;
Leech et al. 2009: 21, 71ff.). There is a tradition of attributing this change to IrE – and
Scots – influence on NAmE (e.g. Jespersen 1909–49, vol. 4: 260; Mencken 1936: 179,
384; Kytö 1991: 336; Montgomery 2001a: 120, 133; Dollinger 2008: 239–41).
It is difficult to accept at face value this account of the Irish/Scots origins of will
with all persons.3 First, there have been few historical studies of shall/will variation in
IrE, and these have until recently been case studies using small amounts of data and
focused on the upper strata of Irish society. Second, studies using relevant historical
data offer at best equivocal support for the view that shall has never been widely used
in IrE (Hulbert 1947), or even evidence to the contrary (Facchinetti 2000). Third, recent
corpus-based historical work, using larger amounts of data from longer time periods,
indicates that usage in Ireland changed from predominant use of shall in the eighteenth
to will since the nineteenth century. This has been observed in studies based on the
literary data of Hickey’s (2003) Corpus of Irish English (Nikolaisen 2011) and work
using data from CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty
2011; McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a).
The present study examines shall/will use in IrE in the crucial years between 1761
and 1890, a period spanning the era of language shift in Ireland. Our results tally with
Nikolaisen’s (2011) findings, based on literary texts (mainly dramas), showing shall
was dominant in Ireland in the late eighteenth century. We show that, from the late
2
3
Whether these rules described observed usage or not has been debated (see Fries 1925; Hulbert 1947; Taglicht
1970; Moody 1974).
First-person shall is reported as almost non-existent in other present-day varieties, too (see Mair 2006: 102;
Trudgill & Hannah 2008: 24–31; J. Miller 2008: 304).
‘ [ T H E I R I S H ] F I N D M U C H D I F F I C U LT Y I N T H E S E AU X I L I A R I E S
409
. . . P U T T I N G WILL F O R SHALL W I T H T H E F I R S T P E R S O N ’
eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries shall was a variant used primarily by urban
writers and in more formal contexts. Like Nikolaisen’s study, ours also shows a sharp
fall in shall-use in the nineteenth century, though it was most likely to be maintained in
more formal and/or polite usage, and among the ‘better sort’. Comparison with other
regional varieties in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggests IrE
was unlikely to be the source of innovation in NAmE. Rather, we seem to have a case
of widespread colloquialisation, with vernacular usage gaining ground and beginning
to oust an established distinction of the standard language that enjoyed overt prestige
and use by the educated and upper classes, as well as the advocacy of normative
grammarians and educationalists.
This development might be linked to the advance of literacy in the English-speaking
world as a whole and in Ireland specifically. Widespread vernacular usage – a continuing
colloquial preference for will with all persons contra standard usage and the normative
tradition (Rissanen 1999) – may have found its way into the written record as more
people of lower social status acquired literacy skills and left recorded evidence of their
language. In Ireland, the spread of literacy was also connected with the spread of the
English language itself as the language shift from Irish to English progressed.
Since language shift was involved in the spread of English in Ireland, we must
consider the possibility of Irish substrate influence. Direct formal influence on the
choice between shall and will can be ruled out. The Irish future is a true tense, formed
morphologically. Simplifying somewhat, the future in Irish is formed by adding one of
the endings -fa(i)dh, -óidh/-eoidh to the root form of the verb: leag ‘lay’ > leagfaidh
‘will lay’, nigh ‘wash’ > nighfidh ‘will wash’, fan ‘wait’ > fanóidh ‘will wait’, etc. (Ó
Siadhail 1989: 171–6). It is thus of an entirely different kind to the English expression
of futurity using the modals will/shall or going to. However, it has been suggested
that phonetic similarity between will and the form of the Irish substantive verb bí
‘be’ used in forming, e.g., questions (An bhfuil tú . . . ? /ə wʌl tʉ/ ‘Are you . . . ?’)
might have contributed to generalisation of will by speakers of Irish English (AmadorMoreno 2010a: 45), at least in interrogatives, where shall has been strongly maintained
in BrE.
We suggest that the acquisition of the standard distinction between shall with
first-person and will with other subjects is precisely the kind of rule requiring an
arcane and rather arbitrary distinction that is likely not to be acquired, particularly
by Irish-speaking adults learning English as a second language in informal settings.
Consequently, the shall/will distinction would not have been part of the input for Irish
children acquiring English as their first language, and would not have survived long
in IrE. Until late in the eighteenth century, English in Ireland remained primarily the
language of British settlers and their descendants, which might explain why shall
remained solidly in use until then. In the nineteenth century, a swelling majority of
English-speakers in Ireland were either bilinguals or (descendants of) people who
had only recently abandoned ancestral Irish. In a situation of contact with language
shift, the shall/will distinction would have been a prime candidate for decline and
obsolescence.
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2 Empirical history of ‘the Irish difficulty’
As previously noted, there has been little empirical research into the shall/will issue in
IrE. Centuries of condemnation of the Irish for not making the distinction, and recent
findings that shall is not used in Ireland today, suggest little scope for diachronic
investigation of shall/will variation. Yet variation and change in this area of IrE
grammar can be documented from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
onwards, and historical records of Irish aversion to shall might be due to prescriptivists’
preference for anecdotal evidence and plagiarism, rather than empirical observation.
The earliest relevant empirical work is Hulbert’s (1947) study of shall/will in
the eighteenth century. This is not directly concerned with IrE, but offers useful
evidence, because it includes data from Dubliner Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Perhaps
unexpectedly, given his prescriptivist reputation, Swift did not follow the normative
rule: his usage was variable but showed a preference for first-person will (78%, n =
537) (Hulbert 1947: 1181, fn. 15). That Swift, the only Irish writer in Hulbert’s sample,
strongly preferred will might suggest this was the norm in Ireland at the time.
Further evidence of eighteenth-century IrE variation is provided by comparison of
Swift and fellow Irish writer and close contemporary, George Farquhar (1677–1707).
Farquhar showed an equally strong opposing preference for shall (72%, total n = 50).
So usage in eighteenth-century Ireland might have been more variable than comments
on IrE would suggest (see McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a: 187f.).
Things are complicated by a study of nineteenth-century British newspaper reports
citing Irish politicians, clergy and other public figures, which concludes that ‘the
Irish employed shall with first person subject even more frequently than the English’
(2000: 130). Was there then a rapid shift towards first-person shall in the nineteenth
century? This is suggested in a survey that cites Facchinetti’s work (Tieken-Boon van
Ostade 2009: 90). The puzzle is that this apparently new-found conformity must have
been abandoned well before the twenieth century, as shown by subsequent surveys of
IrE (e.g. Biggar 1897; Molloy 1897; Joyce 1988 [1910]), and continuing prescriptivist
condemnation: e.g. Alford (1866) in Britain and Whitney (1877: 120) in North America.
How can we resolve these contradictory views?
Only diachronic approaches based on large amounts of data can tell us what changes
have occurred in IrE shall/will use in recent centuries. Using the Corpus of Irish
English (Hickey 2003), Nikolaisen (2011: 81) shows that will predominated with firstperson subjects in seventeenth-century Ireland (77% will), but there was a sharp shift
to shall in the eighteenth century (65% shall). Then a rapid swing back to will in
the nineteenth century (71% will) was consolidated in the early twentieth (76% will).
Thus, the preference for shall observed by Facchinetti (2000) in the nineteenth century
might have been due to linguistic conservatism or normative influence among the
relatively higher-class users represented in her data, or the editorial practices of British
newspapers.
Our own corpus does not contain sufficient data from the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries for comparison with Nikolaisen’s study throughout her period,
‘ [ T H E I R I S H ] F I N D M U C H D I F F I C U LT Y I N T H E S E AU X I L I A R I E S
411
. . . P U T T I N G WILL F O R SHALL W I T H T H E F I R S T P E R S O N ’
but as we will see, the shift away from shall towards will from the nineteenth century
onwards is also evident in the more vernacular letter data in CORIECOR (see also
McCafferty 2011; McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a). The next section turns to
our own study of CORIECOR data for the decades between the 1760s and 1880s.
3 Data for a diachronic study of Irish English
As noted in McCafferty (2011), there are few empirical diachronic studies of any aspect
of IrE, which is a primary motivation for compiling CORIECOR. Only a small number
of historical studies of IrE take a long-term view of developments (e.g. Bliss 1979;
Sullivan 1980; Hickey 2003; McCafferty 2004a; Nikolaisen 2011), and these are all
based on literary data, whose validity as linguistic evidence is still sometimes disputed
(see discussion in McCafferty 2010: 142–5). This is an unfortunate lacuna, because it
would be interesting in itself to know more about the development of this early overseas
English.
The lack of historical accounts of IrE is all the more unfortunate, given the enormous
flow of emigration from Ireland to other English-speaking countries, especially North
America, but also Australia and New Zealand, where immigrants from Ireland provided
substantial input into the populations of colonial settler societies, as well as to Great
Britain itself (see Hickey 2004: 99–110; 2007: 384–418), where the Irish in the
nineteenth century became sizeable communities in growing industrial conurbations.
Irish migration was so large that IrE influence on other overseas Englishes is often
claimed, even in the absence of empirical support. Besides the replacement of shall by
will, it has been suggested that IrE influence promoted, e.g., the dramatic increase in
the use of progressive aspect since the nineteenth century (e.g. Strang 1982; Arnaud
1998), and the decline of the have-perfect in NAmE and BrE (e.g. Elsness 2009).
But what is known about the IrE history of these features rests on little data, usually
from literary works and/or the correspondence of literary authors (e.g. Strang 1982;
Arnaud 1998), or British press reports of speeches and statements by Irish politicians,
clergy and lawyers (e.g. Facchinetti 2000). Such data are unlikely to be representative
of the language of the Irish emigrants who might have carried these features to other
territories. Until recently, there have been no diachronic studies of these phenomena in
IrE, and CORIECOR is being developed with precisely such studies in mind.
3.1 Letters as linguistic evidence
CORIECOR is a corpus of personal letters between Irish emigrants and their families,
friends and contacts in Ireland and elsewhere. Personal letters are often regarded as
a relatively ‘oral’ text type. Both historians (e.g. Fitzpatrick 2006: 102) and linguists
(e.g. Cusack 1998: 190) observe that letter writers often regarded their correspondence
as ‘substitute speech’. For example, writing from Maitland, New South Wales, to his
father in County Clare in 1861, Michael Normile sees his letter as standing in for real
talk:
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(1) I fancy I am speaking to you verbaly while I am writing this scroll to you [ . . . ].
(Fitzpatrick 1994: 89)
It was common to view letters in this way, as part of an ongoing, if slow, conversation
between writer and addressee(s). Of course, all were aware that these ‘conversations’
were imaginary.
Letters are not perfectly accurate transcripts – orthographic or phonetic – of actual
speech. Outlining the speech-to-text relationship of written records that might be used
to study the vernacular, Schneider (2002) places letters halfway along a five-point scale
from the ‘recorded’ speech of texts like verbatim stenographed trial records at one pole,
to the ‘invented’ speech of, e.g., literary dialect at the other (Schneider 2002: 72f.).
In this typology, letters are ‘imagined’ speech, and Schneider emphasises the potential
usefulness of letters from semi-literate writers as a means of accessing the vernacular
in the past, because:
. . . when persons who have had but limited experience in writing and exposure to the
norms of written expression are forced to write nevertheless, their writing reflects many
features of their speech fairly accurately. (Schneider 2002: 75f.)
This is also what Montgomery has in mind when he claims that: ‘[N]o other
type of document . . . reveals the speech patterns of earlier days nearly so well or
as fully as family letters’ (1995: 28). Like Schneider, Montgomery was concerned
with accessing the vernacular, and this influenced his evaluation of what kinds of
personal correspondence were worth studying: documents in standard English are of
little interest (Montgomery 2001b: 25).
While only the most vernacular letters may be interesting to linguists sharing
Montgomery’s aim of tracing the British and Irish roots of vernacular features of
Appalachian and other US varieties, our concern is with IrE more generally, and we
wish to apply historical sociolinguistic methods to the study of CORIECOR letter data.
Hence, we are interested in letters written in broad vernacular IrE by semi-literate
writers, but we also see the need to include less vernacular documents. Even letters
written in standard English by high-status or upwardly mobile writers may reflect the
speech of their writers. Such documents have proven good sources of data showing
variation and change in more standardised English, too (e.g. Nevalainen & RaumolinBrunberg 2003).
3.2 Brief description of CORIECOR
CORIECOR letters span the social spectrum from aristocrats and gentry via the
professional middle classes to farmers and labourers. Some of these letters have been
used by historians of Irish emigration (e.g. Schrier 1997 [1958]; Fitzpatrick 1994;
K. Miller 2008; Miller et al. 2003), who often comment on their style and ‘Irishness’,
though both remain unexplored by historians primarily interested in the letters’ contents.
‘ [ T H E I R I S H ] F I N D M U C H D I F F I C U LT Y I N T H E S E AU X I L I A R I E S
413
. . . P U T T I N G WILL F O R SHALL W I T H T H E F I R S T P E R S O N ’
Schrier, who pioneered the use of correspondence in the study of Irish emigration, noted
that:
The style of the letters varied with the training and education of their writers, although
nearly all were enhanced by a charm of expression inherent in the modes and manners
peculiar to Irish speech. (Schrier 1997 [1958]: 23; emphasis added, KMcC & CAM).
Similarly, Fitzpatrick notes that: ‘the language and flavor of the letters were
overwhelmingly Irish’ (2006: 98). As linguists, our focus is, of course, not on the
letters’ contents, but on their language, both in general terms and including precisely
the Irishness mentioned by historians.
Many CORIECOR letters provide evidence of vernacular usage, where a writer
obviously produced writing based on their own IrE speech, as in (2–4), all from a
single short letter, which illustrate phonological features of IrE in the corpus:4
(2) the [ðiː] look verry old (John S. Sinclair, 21 October 1881)
(3) lucinda was sent a great manny [mani] preasants (John S. Sinclair, 21 October 1881)
(4) a gentleman went from Healdsburg to the Pacific coastt and tuck [tʌk] Robert a long
(John S. Sinclair, 21 October 1881)
A widespread IrE pronunciation of they with a long close front unrounded /i/ is
represented in (2), while (3) shows an IrE realisation of many with a short open front
vowel /æa/. And in (4), we have took with a short open central vowel /ʌ/, which is
one of the best-studied vernacular features of Northern IrE (e.g. McCafferty 2001:
157–66).
In morphosyntax, too, this letter shows not only a number of familiar IrE features,
like the Northern Subject Rule, but also some not widely regarded as part of IrE (e.g.
zero possessive ’s and be-deletion). The latter are particularly interesting because they
raise questions of how typical such features were in earlier IrE, where they originate,
and which social groups and regions they were associated with. CORIECOR enables
us to address such questions empirically. Clearly, such letters can reward the linguist
by providing evidence of past language use. Such evidence not only potentially fills
gaps in the diachronic account of an important overseas variety of English, but may
also extend our knowledge of IrE in new directions.
But the vernacular is not the only style present in CORIECOR, and it is important
to bear in mind that style is more than the difference between writing and speech,
which are modes of language use rather than styles. Neither spoken nor written mode
represents a fixed, clearly defined or self-contained style. Moreover, it is an axiom of
modern sociolinguistics that ‘there are no single-style speakers’ (Labov 1972a: 208);
rather, all speakers (and writers) style-shift in systematic ways that have been explored
in terms of, e.g., attention to speech (Labov 1972b) or audience design (Bell 1991).
From whatever perspective, variation is to be expected from writers of all social and
educational backgrounds.
4
Letter dated 21 October 1881 from John S. Sinclair, California, to Margaret Graham, Draperstown, Co. Derry.
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In a large corpus of letters between people of varied social and regional backgrounds,
there is bound to be a range of styles along vernacular–standard and informal–
formal dimensions. The view taken here is the broad one that all letters passing
between Irish emigrants and their families, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and
other correspondents, whether in Ireland or of Irish origin living elsewhere, may be
representative of English usage in Ireland, and may therefore provide data for the
study of IrE. Thus, IrE is defined for our purposes as a continuum of related varieties
comprising more standard(ised), nonstandard, and dialectal or vernacular varieties, all
of which vary.
The relative orality of expression in personal letters, and the stylistic range from
vernacular to informal colloquial and formal, makes the language of letters potentially
ideal data for linguistic study of earlier centuries. Moreover, the spread of literacy
and the explosion of letter-writing that occurred in the nineteenth century following
the introduction of affordable global postage means that this period provides more
vernacular letters by less well-educated members of lower social strata, in addition to
correspondence from the more educated upper strata.5
Personal correspondence has provided data for a number of studies of aspects of
vernacular Englishes (e.g. Montgomery 1995, 2001b; Filppula 1999; McCafferty 2003,
2004b; Hickey 2005: 158–66; Amador-Moreno 2010b; Fritz 2007; Pietsch 2008, 2009;
Dollinger 2008). Letters have also provided data for studies of other languages (e.g.
Elspaß 2005; also contributions to Dossena & Del Lungo Camiciotti 2012). It has
been demonstrated empirically that the language of personal correspondence is both
more vernacular, and more sensitive to linguistic variation and change, than other text
types (e.g. Kytö 1991; Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003; Fritz 2007). Where it
is possible to compare correspondence with other text types, letters consistently show
greater use of linguistic innovations, such as the use of progressive aspect, which has
been especially marked since about 1800 (see McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012b:
268f.).
CORIECOR is currently under development. It comprises letters spanning the period
from before 1700 to 1940, covering almost the entire period in which IrE emerged. The
version used here incorporates the letter collection of the Irish Emigration Database
(IED) and a couple of smaller collections,6 amounting to a total of some 5000
documents, of which approximately 4,300 are letters. The database comprises around
3.1m words, with some 2.7m words in letters. Coverage is good from the 1760s to the
1940s.
5
6
Some letters, as one reviewer notes, would have been written by ‘scribes’ (relatives, teachers, priests or others),
taking dictation from the sender. This has not been taken into account for the present study. Where textual
information – e.g. ‘your nephew John is writing this for me’ – informs us that a scribe was writing, it might be
possible to empirically compare the language of these texts against more vernacular letters, but that is beyond
the scope of the present article.
The IED is hosted by the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park, in Omagh,
Co. Tyrone (part of Queen’s University Belfast). We thank the director, Brian Lambkin, and Patrick Fitzgerald,
for access and permission to incorporate it into CORIECOR.
‘ [ T H E I R I S H ] F I N D M U C H D I F F I C U LT Y I N T H E S E AU X I L I A R I E S
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. . . P U T T I N G WILL F O R SHALL W I T H T H E F I R S T P E R S O N ’
Table 1. Distribution of CORIECOR data in
subperiods studied
Dates
Letters (n)
1761–1800
1831–40
1881–90
TOTAL
252
227
489
968
Words (n)
96,000
170,000
240,000
506,000
Since the core collection in the IED was compiled by the Public Record Office of
Northern Ireland, there is a bias towards the northern province of Ulster, which is overrepresented, particularly in the earlier subperiods. This bias towards the north-east (and
to some extent the south-east) of Ireland may, especially for earlier subperiods, reflect
the fact that these were the first regions of Ireland that became English-speaking. Here,
English was imported by settlers from Britain up to the early eighteenth century (e.g.
Fitzgerald & Lambkin 2008), and here English was the majority language by 1800
(Fitzgerald 1984).
CORIECOR is intended for long-term diachronic research on IrE. Documents of this
kind, representing speakers from all over Ireland, may permit us to trace the emergence
and development of features of IrE through time, as well as studying stylistic, regional,
and social variation. CORIECOR may also be used for comparative studies of IrE and
other varieties. The study of shall/will reported below is an example of this kind of
work.
4 Shall and will in Irish English, 1761–1890
This study samples CORIECOR, using data from the period 1761–90 because directly
comparable evidence is available for these years from (US) AmE, CanE and NWBrE in
Dollinger (2008), whose work also permits comparison with CanE data to 1849; for the
latter purpose, we have also sampled the 1830s in CORIECOR. The trend in IrE from
the late eighteenth century to 1840 was towards rapidly increasing use of first-person
will, and in order to see how this developed as the century progressed, we have also
sampled the 1880s.7 Our data thus cover a 130-year timespan that includes the core
period of language shift. The amount of material in each subperiod studied is shown in
table 1.
For comparison with other varieties and previous studies, we follow the most relevant
corpus-based studies in counting only full forms of the modals, since contracted ’ll
may be a contraction of either shall or will; the unambiguous contracted negative forms
shan’t and won’t are included (Kytö 1991; Dollinger 2008: 232). Exclusion of contracted
forms does not affect the present study much, since there are few contractions of any
7
The 1830s and 1880s refer to the decades starting and ending 1831–40 and 1881–90.
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Table 2. First-person shall and will in IrE personal letters,
1761–1890 (n = 1463)
1761–90
1831–40
1881–90
Total
Shall
%
Will
%
Total
187
204
145
536
73
45
19
70
254
603
927
27
55
81
257
458
748
1,463
kind in the CORIECOR data studied. Examples of the forms counted are given in
(5–10).
(5) We shall only take care that his attendance shall be regular at Public Worship. (Carlile
Pollock, 23 June 1789)
(6) However, if my Mother thinks proper I will take it at Glasgow (William Drennan, 25
January 1778)
(7) I shant neglect writing you often (Hamilton Young, 5 December 1787)
(8) and for that Reason I will Not Drink one half [kenn?] in his house this year (Thomas
Shipboy, 9 November 1774)
(9) How shall I describe our sensation when we first saw this stupendous fancy of Nature
(Robert Peel Dawson, 24 August 1838)
(10) if you write soon I will get it & shall reply at once (A.M. Faul, 8 September 1889)
Most of the data consist of first-person shall and will in declarative clauses, both
positive and negative, as in (5–8); the contracted form shant in (7) is one of very few
negative contractions in the data (n = 16/1463, 1%). Interrogative clauses are also
infrequent (n = 12/1463, 1%) and occur exclusively with shall, as in (9); these must
be excluded from GoldVarb analysis because they show no variation. Finally, tokens
like (10) are encountered, with shall and will in close proximity, referring to the same
first-person subject, and both conveying futurity.
The raw frequencies presented in table 2 and figure 1 indicate that shall was more
common in earlier IrE than the normative tradition or studies of more recent IrE would
suggest. Shall/will variation extended throughout our period, though with a sharp drop
in the proportion of shall and an increase in will. In the late eighteenth century, 73 per
cent of tokens were shall, while will was the majority form by the 1830s (55 per cent),
increasing further to 81 per cent by the 1880s. This rapid change shows that IrE only
began approaching its present-day exclusive use of will in the late nineteenth century.
This accords with the findings reported in Nikolaisen (2011).
How does this compare with other Englishes? Dollinger (2008) provides points
of comparison with other varieties. In a recent study, we compared our IrE findings
to Dollinger’s results from the US, Canada and Great Britain in the late eighteenth
century, and with CanE also in the early nineteenth (McCafferty & Amador-Moreno
2012a: 193–6). In the eighteenth century, CanE and IrE were equally conservative in
generally using first-person shall. Our study also partly supports Dollinger’s claim that
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. . . P U T T I N G WILL F O R SHALL W I T H T H E F I R S T P E R S O N ’
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1761-90
1830s
Shall
1880s
Will
Figure 1. First-person shall/will in IrE personal letters, 1761–1890 (n = 1463)
what he terms ‘SIN-speakers’ (Scots, Irish, Northern English) may have promoted the
spread of will in Canada. However, will was more frequent in late eighteenth-century
NWBrE than in the colonial varieties AmE, IrE and CanE. Replacement of shall by
will thus appears to have happened simultaneously in Ireland, North America, and parts
of England, suggesting to us that the switch to will might be associated with increasing
literacy and associated colloquialisation, which is one linguistic effect of the spread
of literacy (McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a: 197). Our hypothesis is, therefore,
that literacy helped spread first-person will as a change from below.
5 Multivariate analysis of shall/will in Irish English, 1761–1890
Turning now to the influence of selected internal and external constraints on shall/will
variation in IrE from 1761 to 1890, we test the relative strength of a small set of social
and linguistic factor groups shown in previous studies to affect variation between
these modals. The five factor groups studied are: intimacy, verb (type), clause type,
gender/sex, and geographical origin. Their influence is assessed using GoldVarb X
(Sankoff et al. 2005) to analyse data extracted from CORIECOR using Wordsmith
tools 5.0 (Scott 2009). Our total data set consists of 1463 tokens of the full forms shall
and will (and shan’t/won’t) across the CORIECOR subsamples: 1761–90, the 1830s
and 1880s.
The results of the multivariate analysis are summarised in tables 3, 4 and 5 for each
subperiod. Factor groups are arranged in order of significance according to the range
of weightings in each group, so that the order of presentation changes between tables.
GoldVarb weightings measure the likelihood of shall-use: the rule of thumb is that
scores over .50 favour while weights below .50 disfavour shall; scores close to .50 are
interpreted as neutral. Table 3 presents the results for the late eighteenth century; here,
just two factor groups – intimacy and place – proved statistically significant at the .05
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Table 3. GoldVarb analysis of shall/will in late eighteenth-century IrE
(CORIECOR 1761–90)
Corrected mean/input .728
Factor groups/factors
wt.
Log likelihood -124.064
%
N
wt.
%
N
Verb
Be
Communication (written)
Have
Communication (spoken)
Perception/feeling
Other verbs
Range
[.67]
[.64]
[.63]
[.40]
[.39]
[.37]
30
87
85
83
56
74
59
30
60
23
27
31
76
Gendera
Male
Female
Range
[.51]
[.35]
16
76
52
231
21
Clause typea
Subordinate clause
Main clause
Range
[.59]
[.48]
11
80
71
51
202
a
Intimacy
Social superior
Close nuclear family
Other distant
More distant family
Close personal friend
Range
.99
.53
.46
.30
.27
72
70
80
60
59
70
10
153
35
34
23
Place
Tyrone
Belfast
Dublin
Down
(London)Derry
Other places
Antrim
Range
.68
.68
.65
.38
.25
.37
.00
68
80
85
79
67
52
61
15
46
100
29
9
29
31
13
a
Factor groups/factors
Total N 257
Not significant at 0.05 level; other factor groups significant.
level, while gender, clause type, and verb were not significant. In the analyses for the
1830s (table 4) and 1880s (table 5), all five factor groups are significant.
5.1 Intimacy
Intimacy is for our purposes defined in terms of relationships between correspondents.8
In the 1830s, unfortunately, there were no data from letters to social superiors. As
table 4 shows, in this decade, intimacy was the third most significant factor group.
Close nuclear family (perhaps motivated by respect or deference to parents) slightly
favour shall (.55), while letters to more distant family do so even more strongly (.61). In
the family categories, subdivision by inter- versus intragenerational letters (e.g. from
parent to child and uncle/aunt to nephew/niece or vice versa, and between coevals)
might be revealing, though for the present data, the low number of tokens would make
this unfeasible. Other distant addressees were neutral (.51), while shall was disfavoured
in letters to close friends (.26). Once again, intimacy or formality is important in relation
to the use of shall.
8
One reviewer wondered if shall might have occurred more in ritual letter openings or closings. This was not
examined for the present study, and visual examination of the data does not suggest this was a factor, though
future work using the whole corpus might consider this aspect.
‘ [ T H E I R I S H ] F I N D M U C H D I F F I C U LT Y I N T H E S E AU X I L I A R I E S
419
. . . P U T T I N G WILL F O R SHALL W I T H T H E F I R S T P E R S O N ’
Table 4. GoldVarb analysis of shall/will in IrE (CORIECOR 1831–40)
Corrected mean/input .445
Factor groups/factors
Place
Meath
Other places
Tyrone
Belfast
Down
(London)Derry
Armagh
Dublin
Antrim
Range
Verb
Perception/feeling
Have
Be
Motion
Other verbs
Communication (spoken)
Communication (written)
Range
Log likelihood -264.491
wt.
%
N
.77
.72
.58
.58
.56
.53
.43
.43
.19
58
67
58
52
48
45
52
33
33
17
3
31
89
101
40
107
6
3
78
.73
.68
.64
.48
.44
.35
.31
42
68
68
60
47
37
26
29
53
25
77
36
159
23
75
Total N 458
Factor groups/factors
wt.
%
N
Intimacy
More distant family
Close nuclear family
Other distant
Close personal friend
Range
.61
.55
.51
.26
35
47
49
38
26
19
334
16
74
.55
.37
18
44
44
341
115
.55
.48
7
52
40
130
320
Gender
Male
Female
Range
Clause type
Subordinate clause
Main clause
Range
All factor groups significant at 0.05 level.
In the 1880s (table 5), intimacy remained the third most significant factor group.
Other distant (non-family) addressees most strongly favoured shall in this decade
(.75), followed by social superiors (.63) and nuclear family members (.59). Again, this
weighting for close nuclear family might indicate continuing respect for parents. That
shall apparently tended to be increasingly favoured in letters between nuclear family
members as the nineteenth century progressed might reflect changing family structures,
and it might therefore be interesting to distinguish between child-parent correspondence
on the one hand and parent–child and sibling–sibling letters on the other. With more
distant family and close personal friends, as expected, shall is disfavoured (.45 and .42,
respectively).
5.2 Place
CORIECOR’s regional bias towards the northern province of Ulster has been noted.
While token numbers are small outside Ulster, there is no reason to suppose there
is a North–South difference with regard to shall/will. There are few morphosyntactic
differences between Northern and Southern IrE, and it has never been suggested that
treatment of shall/will is one of them.
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Table 5. GoldVarb analysis of shall/will in IrE (CORIECOR 1881–90)
Corrected mean/input .127
Log likelihood -286.707
Factor groups/factors
wt.
%
N
Place
Wicklow
Dublin
Limerick
Armagh
Antrim
Fermanagh
Down
Belfast
Other places
(London)Derry
Tyrone
Donegal
Range
.91
.90
.84
.83
.75
.57
.54
.47
.46
.43
.18
.10
81
67
64
29
54
32
19
18
15
15
10
3
2
15
14
7
43
69
181
84
39
68
93
87
48
Verb
Perception/feeling
Have
Be
Motion
Other verbs
Communication (written)
Communication (spoken)
Range
.68
.68
.64
.60
.47
.29
.22
33
27
28
25
17
8
6
46
82
82
116
63
200
134
53
Total N 748
Factor groups/factors
wt.
%
N
Intimacy
Other distant
Social superior
Close nuclear family
More distant family
Close personal friend
Range
.75
.63
.59
.45
.42
33
35
50
27
14
12
29
10
266
198
241
Clause type
Subordinate clause
Main clause
Range
.64
.47
17
30
16
145
598
Gender
Male
Female
Range
.57
.46
11
17
25
461
276
All factor groups significant at 0.05 level.
Nurmi (2003: 94f.) reports no regional pattern in England involving London, East
Anglia, the North and the Royal Court. Our results for the late eighteenth century
indicate a rural–urban split in Ireland. Shall was strongest in urban centres like Belfast
and Dublin (.68 and .65, respectively), weakest in rural areas of Down, (London)Derry
and Antrim (ranging from .00 to .38), where shall was disfavoured, as it was in the
miscellaneous ‘Other places’ (.37).9 Rural Tyrone appears to go against this trend, with
a shall weighting equal to the urban areas. But much of the Tyrone data comes from
correspondence between a merchant and clients; this may reflect relative formality as
much as regional difference.
Regional origin is significant in relation to shall/will variation in Ireland, and is
worth further attention in a larger-scale study. By the 1830s, regional patterns are more
difficult to perceive, though the preference for shall persists in Belfast and Tyrone (both
.58). The eastern county of Meath has the highest weighting (.77), but this is based on
9
‘Other places’ refers to data from letters that are not localisable.
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very little data (n = 3). Another eastern county, Down (.56), also favours shall, as do
those subsumed in the ‘Other places’ category (.72). (London)Derry is neutral (.53),
while Armagh and Dublin disfavour shall in this analysis (both .43), and Antrim, as in
the previous subperiod, continues to strongly disfavour it (.19).
By the 1880s (table 5), we discern a broad east–west split: with the exception of
Limerick (.84), where the number of tokens is small (n = 7) and from a single writer,
eastern areas (Dublin, Wicklow, Armagh and Antrim) range from .75 to .91 in favour
of shall. Fermanagh and Down (the latter also on the east coast) weight slightly in
favour (.57 and .54, respectively), while Belfast is neutral (.47) and (London)Derry is
weighted against (.43). Finally, Tyrone and Donegal weight heavily against shall-use
with .18 and .10, respectively. Place is the most significant factor group in relation to
both the 1830s and the 1880s data.
5.3 Verb (type)
We investigated verbs by coding for the following frequent verbs and verb types: be
and have, verbs of perception/feeling (see, hear, etc.), verbs of written communication
(write, send, etc.), verbs of spoken communication (say, tell, etc.), and miscellaneous
‘Other verbs’. In the late eighteenth century, verbs of motion were categorically used
with shall and were excluded from GoldVarb analysis, but they are included for the
1830s and 1880s, where there is variation.
Table 3 shows that, although verb (type) was not significant in the late eighteenth
century, the two most frequent verbs – be and have – both favoured shall (.67 and
.63, respectively), as did verbs of written communication (.64). On the other hand,
verbs of spoken communication disfavoured shall (.40), and the same applies to verbs
of perception/feeling (.39) and the miscellaneous ‘Other verbs’ (.37). Verbs relating
to written communication may be particularly frequent in the data because they are
directly linked to the activity of writing, which correspondents often refer to. The data
set for the late eighteenth century was small (n = 257), which restricted the number of
tokens for even fairly frequent verbs. In future research, more individual verbs might
occur frequently enough for separate analysis. In the present study, none of the most
frequent verbs, and few others within categories favouring shall, were notably formal,
though it may also be worth examining this aspect in future.
In the 1830s (table 4), verbs of perception/feeling, have and be all favour shall-use
(.64 to .73). On the other hand, verbs of motion (.48) and the miscellaneous ‘Other verbs’
(.44) are either neutral or mildly disfavour shall. Verbs of communication disfavour
shall-use more strongly in this decade (.35 for spoken, .31 for written). Verb (type) was
the second most significant factor group in the 1830s.
Moving on to the 1880s, table 5 shows verb (type) remained the second most
significant factor group. Here, verbs of perception/feeling, be and have, and verbs of
motion all favoured shall (ranging from .60 to .68), while verbs of written and spoken
communication are weighted against (.29 and .22, respectively).
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5.4 Gender
Linguistic change tends to pattern along gender lines. However, Kytö (1991: 326)
found the writer’s gender had no effect on first-person shall/will in seventeeth-century
English. Nurmi, on the other hand, concluded that, in the Early Modern period, women
led the shift to will (2003: 105f.), though the decline of shall had begun in men’s usage
in the sixteenth century (Nurmi 2003: 95–7).
Our IrE data contain few tokens from women (n = 21) in the eighteenth century, and
gender was not significant. However, the data might be interpreted as showing a male
tendency to prefer shall (76%, compared to 52% for women): GoldVarb weightings
were respectively .52 and .32. In the 1830s, men favoured shall slightly (.55), while
women continued to disfavour it (.37), and in the 1880s, men (.57) remained more
likely to use shall than women (.46). There is a consistent gender difference, then,
albeit not a very robust one: women tended to lead in using the non-standard variant.
It is tempting to suggest that different male/female literacy rates might have affected
usage, and men in Ireland were indeed more likely to be literate than women early in
our period (Ó Ciosáin 1997: 44f.), and continued to lead in literacy rates until the 1881
census (Fitzpatrick 1990: 169, table I). Men might, therefore, have been more disposed
to use the ‘literate’ variant shall, associated with standard English.
5.5 Clause type
Dollinger (2008) studied shall/will in declaratives (negative and affirmative) and
interrogatives. In interrogatives, shall was favoured in both CanE and BrE; will
predominated in declaratives (Dollinger 2008: 235). These findings for interrogatives
agree with Kytö’s results for AmE and BrE a century earlier (Kytö 1991: 329f.).
In all our subperiods, only shall occurred in interrogatives (n = 12); this clause type
is excluded from GoldVarb analysis. In the eighteenth century, there was a preference
for shall in subordinate clauses (.59), while declarative main clauses were neutral (.48).
The tendency towards shall in subordinate clauses might be interpreted as indicating
that shall occurs in more formal (and linguistically complex) contexts.
Clause type continued to play little role in selection of shall in the 1830s, though it
remained most likely in subordinate clauses. Confirming the relative formality of shalluse, it was more likely in subordinate clauses (.55) than in declarative main clauses
(.48). While only shall occurred in interrogatives, exclamatives were categorically
found with will (n = 2).
Finally, in the 1880s, shall remained more likely in subordinate (.57) than in main
declarative clauses (.46), further supporting the idea that formality was important in
relation to shall-use. The sole exclamative in the 1880s data used shall.
5.6 Summary
As we have seen, shall was very frequent in late eighteenth-century IrE, but its use
declined so that it was the minority form in the 1830s, and will was close to categorical in
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first-person contexts by the 1880s. Use of shall was constrained by linguistic and social
factors. In the late eighteenth century, the nature of relations between correspondents
affected shall: in particular, shall was more likely in letters to social superiors, and to
a lesser extent in letters between nuclear family members. With the proviso that there
was no data for social superiors in the 1830s, this pattern seems to have continued
throughout our period, with distant family also favouring shall in the 1830s, and ‘Other
distant’ addressees in the 1880s. Subdividing these broad categories might reveal usage
differences attributable to deference to, e.g., parents or older generations generally in
a society where family relationships were hierarchical and parents exerted a great deal
of authority over their children (K. Miller 2008).
Use of shall was also affected by geographical origin throughout. In the late
eighteenth century, people from urban areas were more likely to use shall, while
those from rural Down, Antrim and (London)Derry – all areas of Scottish settlement
in the seventeenth century – avoided it.10 In the 1830s, the pattern is less clear, but
writers from urban Belfast still favoured shall, as did eastern counties like Meath and
Down. By the 1880s, there was a clearer tendency for shall, where used at all, to be
favoured in urban and eastern counties, i.e. in the more prosperous regions that had
become English-speaking earliest, and where the middle class might have been more
susceptible to BrE norms. As regards the other social factor, gender, men showed a
consistent but weak tendency to select shall more than women throughout the period
1761–1890.
Shall was more likely throughout with the most frequent verbs, be and have. By the
1830s, verbs of perception/feeling were likely contexts for shall-use, and remained so
in the 1880s. Verbs of motion, which disfavoured shall in the 1830s, were favourable
contexts by the 1880s. Meanwhile, verbs referring to written communication at first
favoured shall, but in the 1830s and 1880s it was not likely with such verbs; verbs of
spoken communication disfavoured shall throughout.
As for clause type, the few interrogatives in this CORIECOR data all used shall,
making this the most likely clausal context for this modal. This, of course, conforms to
a general pattern that was more widespread in the past and continues in BrE today (see
Kallen & Kirk 2001), but it is intriguing, given that present-day IrE generally does not
use shall in this clause type: the shift from shall to will has been total in this context,
and it would be interesting to try to trace this change through the entire corpus.
Otherwise, in all three subperiods there was a greater likelihood of shall in
subordinate clauses, while it was disfavoured in declarative main clauses. This might
10 The
issue of Scottishness associated with Northern IrE was raised by one reviewer. This is more relevant for
phonology than for (morpho)syntactic features, where both Northern and Southern IrE, with few exceptions,
share the vast majority of features in common (and also with Northern English English and Scots/Scottish
English). First-person will in Scots is documented by prescriptivist condemnation (though it would be interesting
to see if this is in fact accurate). Correlation between will-use and Scots settlement is not straightforward: certain
regions weighted most strongly against shall in the first subperiod received large numbers of Scottish settlers
((London)Derry, Down, Antrim), but by the 1880s, some areas heavily settled from Scotland strongly disfavoured
shall (e.g. Donegal), while others strongly favoured it (e.g. Antrim). The issue merits further investigation.
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be read as supporting the hypothesis that shall tended to occur in more formal contexts,
since subordinate clauses are more syntactically complex than main clauses.
6 Conclusions and further directions
There is a tradition of partly attributing the shift to first-person will in NAmE to Irish
immigration. Our results cast doubt on the notion that IrE influence drove the spread
of first-person will in NAmE, since IrE did not lead in the use of first-person will in the
late eighteenth century. In fact, BrE, specifically NWBrE, led by a small margin before
1800, when CanE and IrE were equally conservative in preferring shall.
That the use of will increased rapidly in the nineteenth century is clear from our
comparison of Dollinger’s (2008) study of CanE and IrE data from CORIECOR.
However, given Dollinger’s findings for BrE and NWBrE, these results do not suggest
that large-scale migration from Ireland to North America in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries advanced first-person will. We might rather be looking at a
widespread general development in English vernaculars. The situation in other colonial
Englishes that emerged in the nineteenth century might also support the view that firstperson will was a general development in regional Englishes. In Australian and New
Zealand English, too, will dominates today in a way that suggests it may have done
so in the south-eastern English English that constituted the majority input into those
Englishes (see Hundt et al. 2008: 316f.; Collins & Peters 2008: 348f.).
Whatever further diachronic studies of regional Englishes may reveal, it seems safe at
present to reject the hypothesis that IrE drove the change to first-person will in NAmE,
which is said in turn to have influenced the same change in BrE since the early twentieth
century. That will use in the written record of IrE and other varieties might have been
driven rather by the growth of literacy among the lower classes, contributing to greater
colloquialisation or vernacularisation of the written language, seems a potentially more
fruitful hypothesis, which we will pursue in future work.
Some of the findings of our multivariate analysis of shall/will, which show that
the use of shall was constrained by linguistic and social factors, offer support for
the colloquialisation hypothesis. Intimacy between writers and addressees proved an
important constraint: shall was particularly likely to occur in letters to social superiors,
and ‘Other distant’ addressees (without close family ties), but also letters to close family
members were more likely to use shall. This factor group must clearly be refined to
take account of differential levels of intergenerational deference or respect. In any case,
shall seems to have occurred in contexts of relative distance, deference or formality.
This aspect of intimacy or relative social distance seems potentially very important in
relation to shall/will variation and may reward further refinement and analysis. Further
indication that shall was primarily a formal feature in IrE comes from the results for
clause type, which consistently showed that, after interrogatives, shall was more likely
in syntactically more complex subordinate clauses than in main clauses.
Regional variation emerged as another potentially interesting constraint on the
use of shall, but the pattern was not unambiguous. First, we saw an urban–rural
‘ [ T H E I R I S H ] F I N D M U C H D I F F I C U LT Y I N T H E S E AU X I L I A R I E S
425
. . . P U T T I N G WILL F O R SHALL W I T H T H E F I R S T P E R S O N ’
difference in the late eighteenth-century data (as also reported in McCafferty 2011;
McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a), with shall used more by writers from urban
areas. By the 1880s, however, shall – by then much less frequent than in the previous
century – was more likely to be retained in Dublin and the east-coast region. This
geographical distribution is interesting historically, given that the regions that became
English-speaking earliest were centred on the east-coast cities of Belfast and Dublin.
Maintenance of the shall/will distinction in the areas that have been English-speaking
longest suggests it might be worth investigating this feature in relation to the spread
of English from this eastern base into the west and south-west of Ireland, where Irish
survived longer and the English language diffused more as a result of language shift
than British settlement. These, and other lines of enquiry, will be pursued as part of the
CONVAR project.
Authors’ addresses:
Department of Foreign Languages
University of Bergen
PO Box 7805
N-5020 Bergen Norway
kevin.mccafferty@if.uib-no
Department of English
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Extremadura
Avda. Universidad s/n
10075 Cáceres
Spain
camador@unex.es
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