“I hope you will write”: The function of projection structures in a corpus of nineteenth-century Irish emigrant correspondence

This paper examines the use of the pattern Pronoun + Verb + Pronoun (as in I hope you, you think I and she knows he) in a corpus of nineteenth-century Irish emigrant correspondence. The corpus contains 88 letters by four sisters (the Lough sisters), who emigrated from Ireland to America in the 1870s and 1880s. The study aims to investigate how these clauses — described as projection structures — function and how they contribute to the interactive nature of letters, helping to strengthen and maintain familial bonds over time and distance. Corpus methods are used first to identify and extract these patterns. A more qualitative investigation then examines the function of projection structures and how they construct and reflect author/recipient relationships.