Irish-English (IrE) as a contact vernacular permits tense, mood and aspect categories to be marked in a manner which
distinguishes this variety from all other world Englishes. Researchers, however, have been preoccupied with its distinctive tense and
aspect markers and much less is known about the manner in which IrE modal relations are expressed. This paper attempts to redress
the imbalance by comparing aspects of modality in IrE and other English varieties and by introducing a morphosyntactic syntagm
termed “modal be+to” which can be used to express both deontic and epistemic modality. The marker is
frequent in Northern Irish Englishes and a detailed account of its use in the South Armagh vernacular is offered here. In addition,
attention will be given to locating the potential sources of be+to as the product of a language contact
situation.
2023. Double modals in contemporary British and Irish speech. English Language and Linguistics 27:4 ► pp. 693 ff.
Denis, Derek & Alexandra D’Arcy
2019. Deriving Homogeneity in a Settler Colonial Variety of English. American Speech 94:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
FEHRINGER, CAROL & KAREN CORRIGAN
2015. ‘You’ve got to sort of eh hoy the Geordie out’: modals of obligation and necessity in fifty years of Tyneside English. English Language and Linguistics 19:2 ► pp. 355 ff.
McCAFFERTY, KEVIN & CAROLINA P. AMADOR-MORENO
2014. ‘[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries . . .puttingwillforshallwith the first person’: the decline of first-personshallin Ireland, 1760–1890. English Language and Linguistics 18:3 ► pp. 407 ff.
2013. Wpływ form dialektalnych na angielszczyznę ogólną. Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Linguistica 47 ► pp. 106 ff.
Corrigan, Karen P.
2011. Grammatical variation in Irish English. English Today 27:2 ► pp. 39 ff.
Hickey, Raymond
2007. Tracking Dialect History: A Corpus of Irish English. In Creating and digitizing language corpora, ► pp. 105 ff.
Kallen, Jeffrey C. & John Kirk
2007. ICE-Ireland: Local Variations on Global Standards. In Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, ► pp. 121 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.