Orality in Written Texts

Carolina P. Amador-Moreno is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Director of the Research Institute for Linguistics and Applied Languages (LINGLAP) at the University of Extremadura, Spain.

"Although there is highly specialized knowledge undergirding the entirety of the volume, the writing is so clear and so beautifully presented that it will appeal to linguists of all stages, from the undergraduate to the specialist. It does not pander, but it also does not exclude. For this reason, the potential audience is vast. It holds something for almost anyone, from the discourse-analyst to the historical sociolinguist to the corpus linguist to the educator to the grammarian. This book is a rich and carefully crafted resource."Alexandra D’Arcy1, University of Victoria, Canada"An important contribution to research on Irish English in the diaspora, Orality in Written Texts demonstrates the importance of letters as evidence for the language of Irish migrants and the potential contribution of Irish English to other varieties of English across the world."Joan C. Beal, University of Sheffield, UK"This book successfully combines quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpus data in order to investigate the time-depth of widespread linguistic phenomena that have often drawn the attention of both scholarly and more general audiences, such as the Celtic influence on varieties of English and instances of colloquialization. A broad range of examples support well-argued case studies, thus enabling readers to access authentic sources and contributing to dispel myths of recency or stigmatized usage."Marina Dossena, University of Bergamo, Italy

• List of FiguresList of TablesAuthor’s AcknowledgementsList of abbreviationsChapter 1. Introduction: opening windows into the pastChapter 2. The historical context of the lettersChapter 3. The orality of private correspondence. Using emigrant letters for linguistic analysis.Chapter 4. Discourse-pragmatic variationChapter 5. DeicticsChapter 6. Embedded questionsChapter 7. Concluding remarksIndex