Abstract

This article addresses a question which was deemed ‘a mystery in the history of Hiberno-English’ and had defied every attempt at explanation. The research problem is, simply, that in early Hiberno-English the majority of examples of the ‘after perfect construction’, refer not to the past, as in current Irish English, but rather to the future. This article compares 17th century Hiberno-English texts with 16th and 17th century Gaelic texts and demonstrates that the use of the after perfect with future time reference in Hiberno-English is calqued on a similar use of this construction in early modern Irish.