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Part of
Keeping in Touch: Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world
Edited by Raymond Hickey
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10] 2019
► pp. 119–138

Chapter 6
‘I have not time to say more at present’

Negating lexical have in Irish English

Lexical or stative possesssive have has been negated in five ways. Alongside ancient nominal negation (I have no NP) and a newer variant with got (I have got no NP), three verbal negation strategies are found. Bare negation (I have not NP) is the oldest of these, but has ceded ground over the last two centuries to an American-driven innovation using do-support (I don’t have NP) and a British innovation with got (I haven’t got NP). The Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) allows us to study variation and change in the use of these variants from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The analysis shows do-support was added to the Irish English repertoire in this period, but in the early twentieth century it remained rare in Irish English; bare negation persisted as the most robust verbal negation strategy; the got variants occurred only sporadically. Strong maintenance of bare negation and nominal negation with have no indicates that Irish English was a solidly conservative variety in this area of the grammar well into the twentieth century.

Keywords: stative possessive have , negation, do-support, Irish English, Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), personal letters, diachronic change
Article outline
  • 1.More – and less – British than the British themselves: Irish English have negation
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Negation in English: A brief history
    • 2.2Historical accounts of have negation
  • 3.Corpus and data
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Data
  • 4.Results and discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.06mcc
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