Example 2: Irish English accent

Segment 7: A poor Irish haymaker

When a poor Irish haymaker, who had but just learned a few phrases of the English language by rote ... began his speech in a court of justice with these words: “My lord, I am a poor widow” it was sufficient to throw a grave judge and jury into convulsions of laughter.

(Edgeworth, 2006 [1802], p. 22)

This excerpt appears in a book written in 1802 by Maria Edgeworth. The book is filled with reported speech from Irish speakers. In this excerpt, a type of Irish person (“poor Irish haymaker”) is associated with a type of misspoken English often referred to as an “Irish bull”—an utterance that contains a humorous error and reveals the speaker’s ignorance of English. Here, the error occurs when a man reportedly refers to himself as a “widow” instead of a widower.

Figure 4.7 represents the narrating and narrated events in this excerpt. In the narrating event, Edgeworth writes for her readers. As described in the preceding discussion of Inoue, this kind of mass media both projects a speech event between Edgeworth and imagined readers and is taken up in various subsequent individual events of interpretation on the part of readers. The narrated event describes a “bull,” an error in speaking English made by an Irishman, that Edgeworth has overheard. The main characters are “a poor Irish haymaker” and “a grave judge and jury.” These characters represent two different social types with corresponding styles of speech. The ignorant haymaker makes errors in his use of English, and the judge and jury recognize such errors and find them

FIGURE 4.7 Haymaker.

humorous. The judge and jury are represented above the Irishman because of their social superiority, as presupposed in the narrated event.

This social superiority is established through the author’s voicing of the Irish and English characters (we presume that the judge and jury are English, as this characterizes many Irish bulls, although they could be more sophisticated Irish people). The author uses several evaluative indexicals to characterize the Irishman. He is a “haymaker,” “poor,” and has “just learned a few phrases of the English language by rote.” Both the author and the English characters are unsympathetic to the poor Irish haymaker, regarding his manner of speaking as foolish. The author uses direct reported speech to present what the haymaker said—“My lord, I am a poor widow”—helping the reader experience the incongruity of the mistake in the gravity of the legal setting. The Englishmen in the narrated event are “judge and jury.” They are “grave,” serious men, who nonetheless cannot help but succumb to “convulsions of laughter” at the haymaker’s error in English. The juxtaposition of their serious character with the convulsions of laughter creates drama in the situation.

Table 4.5 represents our analysis of this one brief excerpt. The narrated event contains an Irish plaintiff and the English judge and jury. Quoted speech and several evaluative indexicals characterize the Irishman as poor and ignorant. Other evaluative indexicals and the metapragmatic expression “convulsions of laughter” characterize the judge and jury as serious people who cannot help but explode into hilarity at the ignorant Irishman’s error. But we cannot draw broader conclusions from this one short excerpt. Which category of identity is most important here? Is it class (e.g., “poor”), profession (e.g., “haymaker”), education (e.g., “just learned ... English”), or something else? Is this just a brief

	1802 Narrated event: An Irishman speaks foolishly
	Poor, haymaker, judge, jury, grave Reported speech: “widow,” convulsions of laughter
	Not yet fully formed
	Linking Irish bulls and speech errors to poor Irishmen
	Characterizing Irishmen and their speech as foolish

joke at one Irishman’s expense or something more systematic? From just this one example, we cannot determine the implications of the brief social act.