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Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 16:2 (2015) ► pp.277–303

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“I hope you will write”

The function of projection structures in a corpus of nineteenth-century Irish emigrant correspondence

 | Coventry University; University of Birmingham, UK
Published online: 28 January 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.16.2.06mor
This paper examines the use of the pattern Pronoun + Verb + Pronoun (as in I hope you, you think I and she knows he) in a corpus of nineteenth-century Irish emigrant correspondence. The corpus contains 88 letters by four sisters (the Lough sisters), who emigrated from Ireland to America in the 1870s and 1880s. The study aims to investigate how these clauses — described as projection structures — function and how they contribute to the interactive nature of letters, helping to strengthen and maintain familial bonds over time and distance. Corpus methods are used first to identify and extract these patterns. A more qualitative investigation then examines the function of projection structures and how they construct and reflect author/recipient relationships.
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Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E.
2024. “I Thought you had Forgotten me”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Examination of the Mental Verb Think in Irish Emigrants’ Letters. Corpus Pragmatics 8:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Elsweiler, Christine
2022. Gender variation in the requestive behaviour of Early Modern Scottish and English letter-writers? A study of private correspondence. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 8:1 ► pp. 55 ff. DOI logo
De Toni, Francesco
2020. Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen. Multilingua 39:1 ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
De Felice, Rachele & Emma Moreton
2019. Identifying speech acts in a corpus of historical migrant correspondence. Studia Neophilologica 91:2 ► pp. 154 ff. DOI logo
Dossena, Marina
2019. Singular, plural, or collective?. In Keeping in Touch [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 10], ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo

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