“I Thought you had Forgotten me”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Examination of the Mental Verb Think in Irish Emigrants’ Letters

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore the interface between migration experiences and epistolary discourse in CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty and Amador-Moreno in preparation). Using corpus and computational methods, this investigation aims to empirically explore language usage in the letters exchanged between the Irish in the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand and their loved ones back in Ireland. Specifically, the study proposes a corpus-pragmatic examination of the mental verb think in an attempt to explain the function of such verb in the negotiation of epistolary relationships, that is, how it helps to reinforce and maintain crucial emotional and physical links between emigrants and their families in Ireland. The material will be searched using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004). In the quantitative stage, corpus tools such as the Corpus Query Language (CQL) function will be utilised to identify and collect the linguistic patterns that characterise the epistolary discourse under analysis. Qualitatively, a detailed inspection of such patterns will be conducted in order to provide access to historical forms of communication in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish emigration as well as the use of involvement-marking strategies in private letters.