I'm After Gettin' Confused With This

[gothwalk]

There is a construction in use in Hiberno-English that I'm having great difficulty in describing in grammatical terms. It's a sort of present continuous twisted to form a past tense with a negative slant, managed by inserting the word "after".

For example, if someone says "I'm after driving up from the country", then you know that not only have they driven up from the country, but they shouldn't have, or didn't need to, or the like. If someone says "What are you after doing to my bike?", then you can work out that whatever it is you did, they're not happy with it.

So, uh... is there a way to describe this pseudo-tense-thing?

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I don't know. There's a similar thing in Scots English (particularly Glaswegian dialect) with the future tense negative.

"I'm no gunnae dae that" simply means you're not going to do something.

"I'm gunnae no dae that" means you're adamantly not going to do something because it would be foolish/inadvisable.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

It's not always negative. I think it's roughly equivalent to just.

Wikipedia has a couple of examples calling them hot news perfect! But it has other examples that aren't hot news, where it doesn't name the construction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English However, I remember reading this page before, and it didn't seem quite as encyclopedia-like as most wikipedia articles.

I found a couple of other pages that mention it: http://www.hiberno-english.com/grammar.htm
http://www.eamonn.com/2002/11/hibernoenglish.htm

[niallm.livejournal.com]

To me, it actually primarily has the neutral connotation, with the voice indicating the negative slant (or not). "I'm after shiftin' yer wan" for example :)

[loupblanc.livejournal.com]

Weird Slang is how I would call it :p

[bastun-ie.livejournal.com]

Convoluted?

On a vaguely related note, did you see yesterday's Irish Times 'Irishman's Diary'? He talks about the peculiarly Irish double-positive meaning a negative :-)

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Yeah right.

[meehaneo.livejournal.com]

I was told that this is one instance of a direct translation from an Irish idiom (is that the right word?) in which a sentence in Irish begins "Tá mé tar éis ..." and so which translates literally as "I am after ...".

So it stems from the Irish language but I don't know the grammatical context.

[cartographer.livejournal.com]

"Julie is after closing our conversation so will you write again what you said a minute ago"
"The bus is just after coming"

An IM and a text message from Tina today (re-written out of txtspk :->), using that construction, but in a slightly different way.

[brucius.livejournal.com]

I don't know what it's called but you are after wreckin' me buzz an' I am gonna be after you to make you an occasion for the afters mista.

As an after thought, all three of those afters could be seen as negative, maybe it's something a bit like aframosia tinted glasses that result from recent semistressful events like driving up from the country and having someone wreck your head.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

I've heard that construction- not sure where- but when I heard it , it pertained to the future and meant anywhere from a firm plan to a very vague notion of doing something sometime.