Migration, Language and Emotion : Examining Irish Emigrants’ Letters through a Discourse-Pragmatic Lens

This book investigates the relationship that exists between migration, language and emotion in the personal correspondence exchanged between Irish emigrants, who travelled overseas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their loved ones back in Ireland.

This book investigates the relationship that exists between migration, language and emotion in the personal correspondence exchanged between Irish emigrants, who travelled overseas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their loved ones back in Ireland. Based on data from the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) and involving innovative analytic techniques in the field of corpus pragmatics and discourse analysis, the book will shed new light on three main thematic strands: identity nouns, emotion adjectives and the conceptualisation of emotions through mental verbs. The findings will be of interest to students and scholars of corpus pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, emotion studies, Irish migration and postcolonial studies.