“The More Please [Places] I See the More I Think of Home”: On Gendered Discourse of Irishness and Migration Experiences

Abstract

One of the main challenges faced by Irish emigrants was the negotiation of diasporic identities and new community forms. This paper sets out to explore the notions of gender and the conceptualization of Irishness in post-famine emigrants’ personal correspondence (1880–1930). Specifically, the study proposes an in-depth analysis of identity nouns such as home and country in order to elucidate the various ways in which the concepts of identity and mobility are interpreted and constructed within male and female discourses. The data for this chapter come from CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty K, Amador-Moreno CP. In preparation. CORIECOR. The corpus of Irish English correspondence. University of Bergen and University of Extremadura, Bergen and Caceres). This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociolinguistics (Chamber JK, Sociolinguistic theory. Revised edition. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, 2009) and corpus pragmatics (Romero-Trillo J, (ed), Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2008; The yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2013: new domains and methodologies. Springer, Dordrecht: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3, 2013; The yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2014: new empirical and theoretical paradigms. Springer, Dordrecht). Methodologically, our study relies on corpus linguistics techniques, namely keyness analysis and concordance lines, to identify the most common collocations and contextual uses of the nouns under study. In the second part of the analysis, the emotional load of these terms is examined from a sociopragmatic perspective in order to explain the way in which letter writers exploit language “to generate particular meanings, to take up particular social positioning” (Culpeper J, Historical sociopragmatics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. 135 pp, 2011:2).