ABSTRACT
Parodying what he referred to as the ‘Abbey Theatre bogman talk’ of John Millington Synge (1871–1909) and others, Brendan Behan exclaimed: ‘“Oh, man of the roads with your long arm and your strong arm, be after pulling me a pint of porther,” …’ (Behan, [1958] 1990, p. 97; 1981, p. 116). Here, Behan was echoing numerous others, linguists included, in ridiculing an ‘incorrect’ use of the be after V-ing construction to cast doubt on the authenticity of Synge’s Irish English literary dialect. Use of this construction as anything other than a perfect is often regarded as an error typical of writers only superficially familiar with Irish English (henceforth IrE) (e.g. Ó Sé, 2004, p. 243). In this, Behan and others may be reacting to the sheer density of IrE in Synge’s dramas in particular (e.g. Bliss, 1972, pp. 43–46; Kiberd, 1979a, p. 59; 1979b, pp. 204–205). Perhaps no Irish writer before or since has used Hibernicisms in serious literary works at densities approaching those of J.M. Synge. Although his language is sometimes claimed to be a faithful representation of peasant speech (e.g. Todd, 1989, p. 71), it is actually quite deviant in this respect, exaggerating the use of dialect features perhaps even beyond the levels regarded as characteristic of literary dialect (cf. Ives, 1950; Schneider, 2013). Indeed, in a recent analysis, Amador-Moreno and O’Keeffe (2018) show Synge using be after V-ing at rates 5–10 times higher than Brendan Behan and 10–20 times higher than the rate found in the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE), a corpus of present-day conversation.
