Syntactic ambiguity in Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English shows deviations from all areas of Standard English of which syntax is only one. Within this area we have many constructions which have no formal equivalents in Standard English. If we then look at the remaining ones in the field of syntax we find a small number which do have equivalents in Standard English, that is the precise syntactic constructions which do have equivalents in Standard English but with different meanings. The development has been in my view not so much the expansion of certain Standard English syntagmas to become polysemic in Hiberno-English but rather the adoption of many constructions from Irish into English among which were some that already existed in Standard English with a given and different meaning. Because of this belief I offer below Irish equivalents of the Hiberno-English constructions but will leave it up to the reader to decide whether he regards transfer as a plausible explanation of their emergence. Although the constructions presented here have their origins in the 17th and 18th centuries1 they continue to exist in Hiberno-English up to the present. All of them are part of the passive knowledge of the speakers of Hiberno-English and most of them of the active knowledge also. As with phonetic features of this variety of English we find increasing acceptability of non-standard forms with an increase in colloquial register. With syntactic features the speaker’s awareness of their use is lower than with phonetic or lexical features. For this reason we find them represented by speakers who would not indulge in the more salient phonetic characteristics of Hiberno-English or use many of those lexical items which are exclusive to it. The constructions to be treated here can be divided into the morphosyntactical categories they affect. This then gives us the following division: