| Description |
1 online resource (x, 289 pages) |
| Series |
Advances in historical sociolinguistics (AHS) 2214-1057 ; volume 10 |
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Advances in historical sociolinguistics ; v. 10.
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| Contents |
Mining emigrant correspondence for linguistic insights / Raymond Hickey -- The language of emigrant correspondence. Wisconsin immigrant letters: German transfer to Wisconsin English / Angela Bagwell, Samantha Litty and Mike Olson -- I hope you will excuse my bad writing : Shall vs. willin the 1830s Petworth Emigration to Canada Corpus (PECC) / Stefan Dollinger -- Singular, plural, or collective?: grammatical flexibility and the definition of identity in the correspondence of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants / Marina Dossen -- The language of the Irish emigrant experience. Homesickness, recollections and reunions: topics and emotions in acorpus of female Irish emigrant correspondence / Emma Moreton and Chris Culy -- "I have not time to say more at present": negating lexical have in Irish English / Kevin McCafferty -- "Matt & Mrs Connor is with me now. They are only beginning to learn the work of the camp": Irish emigrants writing from Argentina / Carolina P. Amador-Moren -- Grammatical variation in nineteenth-century Irish Australian letters / Raymond Hickey -- "[S]eas may divide and oceans roll between but Friends is Friends whatever intervene". Emigrant letters in New Zealand / Dania Jovanna Bonness -- Vernacular correspondence: widening the scope. "[T]his is all [,] answer soom" African American vernacular letters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Lucia Siebers -- Morphosyntactic features in Earlier African American English: a qualitative assessment of semi-literate letters / Alexander Kautzsch -- Memoirs from Central America: a linguistic analysis of personal recollections of West Indian laborers in the construction of the Panama Canal / Stephanie Hackert |
| Summary |
"The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters, written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain, who settled at these locations in the past few centuries, with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of English which do not necessarily appear in later sources or which are not attested with the same range or in the same set of grammatical contexts. This has to do with the vernacular nature of the letters, i.e. they were written by speakers who had a lower level of education and whose speech, and hence their written form of language, does not appear to have been guided by considerations of standardness and conformity to external norms of language. Furthermore, the writers of the emigrant letters, examined in the current volume, were very unlikely to have known of, still less have used, manuals of letter writing. Emigrant letters thus provide a valuable source of data in tracing the possible development of features in varieties of English in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand"-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on November 25, 2019) |
| Subject |
English language -- Variation.
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English language -- History -- 19th century
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Immigrants -- English-speaking countries -- Correspondence
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Immigrants -- Language
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Sociolinguistics.
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sociolinguistics.
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English language
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English language -- Variation
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Immigrants -- Language
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Sociolinguistics
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English-speaking countries
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| Genre/Form |
History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| Author |
Hickey, Raymond, 1954- editor.
|
| LC no. |
2019036911 |
| ISBN |
9789027261885 |
|
9027261881 |
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