Expanding the Superstrate

“What bees to be maun be”

“…Determining that their trigger was, indeed, characterised in this way is beyond the scope of the present paper, though it is worth mentioning that the corpus contains a range of structures such as those in (66) below which have been associated with exactly this sort of arrested development in other (former) English colonies (cf. (67) and Bailey and Görlach 1982;Christian, Wolfram and Dube 1988;Feagin 1979;Görlach 1991;Harris 1986;Kachru 1983;Platt, Weber and Ho 1984;Mesthrie 1992). …”

“…As a result of the language contact which resulted, be with a durative reading as in (59) below eventually became, in Odlin's terms, an "interlanguage 'recreation' of the superstrate" (Odlin 1992: 180). Significantly, as (59) and (60) show, SArE habitual be can appear in either an inflected or uninflected form, and there is evidence that this was also the case for its early northern English and Scots predecessor (Craigie, Aitken and Stevenson 1931-;Grant 1931Grant -1976Grant and Murison 1986;Harris 1986;Wright 1898). Indeed, as (61)-(63) demonstrate, tense (and therefore subject-verb agreement) is covert in these contexts as it is subordinate to habitual aspect.…”

“…Early treatments of IrE such as Bliss (1972) emphasised the crucial role played by Irish in the development of the contemporary dialects while more recent accounts like that of Harris (1991) have highlighted the importance of diffusion from Early Modern English vernaculars; and there are other more extreme versions of this retentionist position such as that of Lass (1990: 148), who argues that Southern IrE exhibits "only marginal contact effects". Although Kallen (1997: 4) notes that apart from Corrigan (1993), Filppula (1993) and Kallen (1988; there has been much less research in the Irish-English context on the effects of transitional bilingualism, he suggests that it may well be a significant line of enquiry as:…”

“…Since there appear to be a range of potential sources for this unusual SArE be + to syntagm, sections 3.1.-3.2. which follow will assess the arguments for and against Irish transfer, substratal retention and acquisitional phenomena using similar methodological principles to those applied to other aspects of IrE morphosyntax by Harris (1986;, Filppula (1990;1999), Filppula and Sarhimaa (1994), Kallen (1986;) and Odlin (1989;. 12) Cf.…”

English as a World Language — The State of the Art

“…Even the traces of IrE speech patterns that are so easy to predict for Newfoundland, the Ottawa Valley dialects and in Caribbean creoles (where Irishmen are known to have formed a large portion of the indentured servants and overseers on plantations) have only lately begun to be investigated by Clarke (1985), Pringle (1981), by Harris (1986) and Rickford (1986), and Jeffrey respectively. As regards South Africa, Lanham (1982) has provided a neat model which correlates present-day sociolects of SAfE with settlement history, especially the contrast between lower-middle-class Cape English, and later upper-middle-class Natal English, but this neat explanation is beginning to be questioned (by Lass/ Wright 1986;cf.…”