Irish English and the Ulster Scots Controversy by Jeffrey Kallen
From: Ulster Folk Life Vol.45, 1999. (Published by Ulster Folk & Transport
Museum, Cultra)
The record of dialectal English on uses of periphrastic do is difficult in many cases to interpret, due to the fragmentary nature of much of our available data. Nevertheless, habitual uses such as They do be getting all their bad ways again (Sussex) and The childer do be laffen at me (Cornwall) in Wright's English Dialect Dictionary 112, show that use of periphrastic do as a habitual marker has not been restricted to Ireland. Inhalainen's work on past tense uses of periphrastic do in traditional Somerset dialect shows a strong tendency for this form to be used in generic or habitual functions. 113. Weltens, in attempting to chart the contemporary use of periphrastic do in the Southwest of Britain, found that while the form was widely recognised, it was only in the one Welsh data point that it was strongly associated with habitual aspect. 114. Whether this finding results from further developments in Southwest British English, from yet another Celtic source (as suggested by Tristram's treatment) 115 or from other factors, can only be guessed at.
What, then, are we to make of generic and habitual time reference in Ulster Scots, in the light of the origins and variation controversies in Irish English? At its most Scots, the system of time marking which Robinson described includes the lexical marker aye and a generalised use of the s ending on verbs to denote habituality. These forms, which are not shared with general Irish English, are shared with the Scots of Scotland, although aye is also found in older English 116 and Robinson's evidence for the precise pattern of the habitual verb ending in Ulster Scots, is not altogether clear. Following from Traugott, the use of inflected be may also be shared with older Scots and northern English, though not necessarily (or strongly) in the habitual sense. Even less distinctively Scots is the Ulster Scots use of do as a generic or habitual marker, since its geographic stronghold in British English dialects appears to be in the Southwest, and since it is widely distributed throughout Ireland. Holding together the generic/habitual use of inflected be, habitual or generic do and the do be collocation is the hypothesis, far removed the Scots, that the drive to express habitual aspect in Ireland generally (including the Ulster Scots area) stems historically from the use of the punctual vs. durative/habitual distinction in the Irish Language.117
Assembling the evidence, we can only be struck by the difficulty of proof
in these matters (given our available evidence) and by the power of the
notion of convergence. Possible, the use of inflected be came to Ireland
with Scots and diffused geographically but became focused semantically as
a habitual marker, and possibly the use of do as a habitual marker (freed
to co-occur with be either as a main verb or as an auxiliary) takes its
lexical model from early modern and dialectal uses of do in English. Possibly
the vitality in Ireland of both do and inflected be markings stems ultimately
from the use of a habitual verb category in Irish and possibly there has
been a convergence between non Scots type Irish English and Ulster Scots
on this variable (among many others). All this remains as speculation, yet
it is in precisely this area that the understanding of Ulster Scots in connection
with the controversies of Irish English has a great deal to contribute to
the understanding of language in Ireland and the mechanics of language change
generally. |
