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Article published In: English World-Wide
Vol. 38:2 (2017) ► pp.125–152

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The Northern Subject Rule in the Irish diaspora

Subject-verb agreement among first- and second-generation emigrants to New Zealand

 | Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Published online: 28 September 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.38.2.01bon
Abstract
This article examines the Northern Subject Rule in the Irish diaspora, studying letters from two generations of an Ulster emigrant family in 19th-century New Zealand. The study shows that the concord pattern frequently used by the parent generation almost completely disappeared in the language of their New Zealand-born children. The results suggest that the children skipped the stage of “extreme variability” that is claimed to be characteristic of the language of the first colony-born immigrants in the new-dialect formation framework (Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This study aims to contribute to work on early New Zealand English grammar (e.g. . 2012. “Towards a Corpus of New Zealand English: News from Erewhon?” Te Reo: Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand 551: 51–74.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2015a. “ Do-Support in Early New Zealand and Australian English”. In Peter Collins, ed. Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 65–86.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2015b. “Heterogeneity vs. Homogeneity”. In Anita Auer, Richard J. Watts, and Daniel Schreier, eds. Letter Writing and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 72–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Hundt, Marianne, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2012. “Animacy in Early New Zealand English”. English World-Wide 331: 241–263. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and it adds new insights into the formation of New Zealand English. It, furthermore, contributes to research on dialect contact between Irish English and other colonial varieties of English as well as new-dialect formation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1New-dialect formation
    • 1.2Subject-verb agreement in World Englishes
  • 2.The situation in New Zealand English
    • 2.1The Irish in Canterbury
    • 2.2Subject-verb agreement in Hay and Schreier (2004)
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Plural is/was in Ulster letters
    • 4.1Use of plural is/was in the language of the original Ulster immigrants
    • 4.2Use of plural is/was in the language of second-generation New Zealand-born immigrants
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
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Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E. & Carolina P. Amador-Moreno
2023.  ‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 9:2 ► pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
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