Documents Odlin (T.) 3 résultats

For about a hundred years, if not longer, linguists have offered competing explanations for the sources of Hiberno-Enghsh. From at least as early as an 1896 article by William Burke, some have attempted to account for the distinctiveness of the English of Ireland largely in terms of retentions of patterns found in the dialects of Britain. Yet about as early as Burke, other observers have looked to Irish as a major source, as seen, for example, in the writing of P. W. Joyce (1910/1988).' To this day, different explanations continue to be offered, and now universalist arguments are among those seen in the literature (e.g. Guilefoyle 1986). The diversity of opinions is all the greater since some scholars have opted for extreme positions: Blîss (1984), for example, insisted on the primacy of the Irish substrate, whereas Lass (1990) has been just as convinced about the primacy of the British Enghsh superstrate. Many more researchers, however, have invoked multicausal arguments, as seen, for example, in articles by Harris (1984, 1986). Those familiar with other language contact situations such as Caribbean creoles can easily recognize how similar the issue of sources is in many historical periods and in many parts of the world (e.g., Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Mufwene 1990,1993,1994).
Although scholars disagree about the importance of substrate influence in Hiberno-English, they usually agree on what the Irish
pattern is that is hypothesized to occasion the influence, as seen, for example, in the discussion by Harris (1986) of habitual verb
phrases. Whether or not everybody agrees with Harris that the habitual tenses of Irish contributed to the rise of habitual do constructions, most researchers probably concur on what the verb patterns in Irish are that may have occasioned cross-linguistic influence. Without such agreement, it would be much more difficult to determine the merits of substratist and other positions.
Unfortunately, there exist some cases where it is not so easy to assume what Irish pattern may be the source for a Hiberno-English construction. One instance of this is seen in the use of the form sorrow as a negator, which is the topic of this paper. The discussion
to follow consists of five parts: 1) a description of the basic characeristics of sorrow negation; 2) a survey of the reasons for believing
that substrate influence is involved; 3) a look at forms in Irish and Scottish Gaelic that may be the basis for sorrow negation; 4) a provisional explanation for the diffusion of substrate influence in the use of sorrow in Hiberno-English; 5) a surnmary and some thoughts on the implications of this problem.

Although scholars have studied Hiberno-English for over a century it has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. The vernacular English of Ireland has interested not only specialists in the history and dialectology of English, but also creolists (e.g., Winford 1993), students of second language acquisition (e.g., Duff 1993), folklorists (e.g., O'Dowd 1991), and literary critics (e.g., Hirsch 1983/ 1988). It is no exaggeration to say that Ireland offers one of the best research sites to study certain types of linguistic and cultural change: indeed, investigators such as Thomason and Kaufinann (1988) have seen Irish Enghsh as one of the most promising modern cases of a kind of 1anguage shift" once more common, the shift here being the nearextinction of Irish as a community language and the concomitant adoption of English. In effect, studies of such a shift offer valuable hints about processes at work in earlier contact situations, such as the spread of Semitic languages in Ethiopia and Indo-European languages in India.

Considerable work has been done on the structure, variation, and history of Hiberno-English (e.g., Henry 1957, Braidwood 1964, Bliss 1979, Harris 1984a, Filppula 1986, Kallen 1995). However, many important aspects of Hiberno-English remain only vaguely understood. One especially important question is how speakers of Irish came to learn English. The shift from. a Celtic to a Germanic language did not happen overnight: over four centuries of bilingualism were required. This long spart of time naturally complicates any attempts to understand the dynamics of the shift. Yet despite the long span and despite the fact we cannot know all the individual histories of the many Irish speakers who learned English, it is possible to study widespread trends to learn English at the expense and arrive at generalizations that will hold true for many individuals in many places.
This paper is thus an attempt to formulate some viable generalizations about how the shift from Irish to English took place. The first
part of the paper argues that schooling played far less of a role in the shift than some scholars have suggested. The next part considers the role that migratory labour played: there is abundant evidence that migrations from, Irish-speaking to Enghsh-speaking regions had a major impact on Gaeltachts (Le., Irish-speaking regions). That evidence provides the basis for discussion in the next part of the paper, which looks at what the facts can say about the theoretical relation between language shift and patterns of language contact known as pidginization and creolization.