This paper discusses the status of CAN and BE ABLE TO in nineteenth-century Irish English in comparison to English English through means of a corpus study of personal letters. Analysis of the data reveals that the use of BE ABLE TO is conditioned by the combination of time reference and polarity in the English English data but not in the Irish English data. Thus, the data suggest that some writers of nineteenth-century Irish English failed to acquire the subtle differences between CAN and BE ABLE TO present in English English. I propose that the increased use of BE ABLE TO in nineteenth-century Irish English is the result of imperfect learning through perceived similarity (cf. Thomason 2001 and De Smet 2012).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rural midlands of Ireland suffered from agrarian violence and intimidation through threatening notices. In the minds of the authorities, these outrages were committed by members of a secret society, called the "Ribbon

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English. The data shows no change in objective possibility contexts, but in subjective possibility contexts might loses the ability to signal past time.Though the data show some small differences between Irish English and English English, generally it seems that the change identified in Van Hattum (2012a) is due to diachronic variation.

This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener’s identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted.