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Chapter 5. Homesickness, recollections and reunions

Topics and emotions in a corpus of female Irish emigrant correspondence
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Abstract

This study uses corpus and computational methods to explore topics and emotions in a collection of nineteenth-century migrant correspondence. Specifically, it examines letters by two sisters, Annie and Julia Lough, who migrated from Ireland to America in the late 1870s and early 1880s. First, a close reading of the letters is carried out to identify topics and emotions in the discourse. Then, three topics are examined in detail (“Homesickness and Separation”, “Recollection” and “Reunion”), using the Interesting Items Visualisation Tool (IIVT) and Sketch Engine to identify local grammars – words, phrases and structures that are statistically more likely to occur in one topic over another. Our findings show that certain linguistic patterns emerge. For example, in the topic “Homesickness and Separation”, the material verbs CROSS, COME and GO are used when writing about the physicality of separation, while the mental verbs SEEM, LOOK, SEE and WISH are used when writing about psychological aspects of homesickness. Additionally, verbs to do with remembering, forgetting and dreaming (or not dreaming) are statistically significant in the topic “Recollection”. Although working with a very small dataset, our findings demonstrate how this type of analysis might complement more qualitative methods, providing insight into what female migrants wrote about and how, through language, they maintained relationships with family back home.

Abstract

This study uses corpus and computational methods to explore topics and emotions in a collection of nineteenth-century migrant correspondence. Specifically, it examines letters by two sisters, Annie and Julia Lough, who migrated from Ireland to America in the late 1870s and early 1880s. First, a close reading of the letters is carried out to identify topics and emotions in the discourse. Then, three topics are examined in detail (“Homesickness and Separation”, “Recollection” and “Reunion”), using the Interesting Items Visualisation Tool (IIVT) and Sketch Engine to identify local grammars – words, phrases and structures that are statistically more likely to occur in one topic over another. Our findings show that certain linguistic patterns emerge. For example, in the topic “Homesickness and Separation”, the material verbs CROSS, COME and GO are used when writing about the physicality of separation, while the mental verbs SEEM, LOOK, SEE and WISH are used when writing about psychological aspects of homesickness. Additionally, verbs to do with remembering, forgetting and dreaming (or not dreaming) are statistically significant in the topic “Recollection”. Although working with a very small dataset, our findings demonstrate how this type of analysis might complement more qualitative methods, providing insight into what female migrants wrote about and how, through language, they maintained relationships with family back home.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface vii
  4. List of contributors ix
  5. Chapter 1. Mining emigrant correspondence for linguistic insights 1
  6. Part I. The language of emigrant correspondence
  7. Chapter 2. Wisconsin immigrant letters 27
  8. Chapter 3. ‘I hope you will excuse my bad writing’ 43
  9. Chapter 4. Singular, plural, or collective? 67
  10. Part II. The language of the Irish emigrant experience
  11. Chapter 5. Homesickness, recollections and reunions 87
  12. Chapter 6. ‘I have not time to say more at present’ 119
  13. Chapter 7. ‘Matt & Mrs Connor is with me now. They are only beginning to learn the work of the camp’ 139
  14. Chapter 8. Grammatical variation in nineteenth-century Irish Australian letters 163
  15. Chapter 9. ‘[S]eas may divide and oceans roll between but Friends is Friends whatever intervene’ 185
  16. Part III. Vernacular correspondence
  17. Chapter 10. ‘[T]his is all answer soon’ 213
  18. Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic features in earlier African American English 239
  19. Chapter 12. Memoirs from Central America 261
  20. Index 287
Keeping in Touch
This chapter is in the book Keeping in Touch
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.05mor

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface vii
  4. List of contributors ix
  5. Chapter 1. Mining emigrant correspondence for linguistic insights 1
  6. Part I. The language of emigrant correspondence
  7. Chapter 2. Wisconsin immigrant letters 27
  8. Chapter 3. ‘I hope you will excuse my bad writing’ 43
  9. Chapter 4. Singular, plural, or collective? 67
  10. Part II. The language of the Irish emigrant experience
  11. Chapter 5. Homesickness, recollections and reunions 87
  12. Chapter 6. ‘I have not time to say more at present’ 119
  13. Chapter 7. ‘Matt & Mrs Connor is with me now. They are only beginning to learn the work of the camp’ 139
  14. Chapter 8. Grammatical variation in nineteenth-century Irish Australian letters 163
  15. Chapter 9. ‘[S]eas may divide and oceans roll between but Friends is Friends whatever intervene’ 185
  16. Part III. Vernacular correspondence
  17. Chapter 10. ‘[T]his is all answer soon’ 213
  18. Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic features in earlier African American English 239
  19. Chapter 12. Memoirs from Central America 261
  20. Index 287
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