Is it truly unique that Irish English clefts are? Quantifying the syntactic variation of it-clefts in Irish English and other post-colonial English varieties

Irish English it-clefts are said to be atypical due to contact-induced transfer. However, they have only been compared to other British Isles varieties and no quantitative study has been conducted to categorize their supposedly unique features. This paper examines unique features of it-clefting in Irish English as compared with other post-colonial Englishes. Quantitative analysis of all it-clefts in sections of the International Corpus of English shows that often, the features of “non-standard” clefting result. from English dialect convergence. A comparison of it-clefts in Irish English with those in British, Jamaican, Singapore, Indian, and East African English identifies variation in post-colonial Englishes and categorizes them according to aspects of Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model to measure a dialect’s level of stabilization. Keywords: It-cleft; post-colonial English; Dynamic Model; language variation; universals; corpus-based analysis