Hawaii Project: research into 19th-century missionary documents in Honolulu
Our research team has been working on some major documents left in Hawaii by members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). For the purpose of exploring the language of 19th-century American missionaries, we have so far compiled the ABCFM Hawaii Corpus (hereafter Hawaii Corpus), which consists of selected documents (journals, letters, and an autobiography) in the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library. More specifically, the corpus includes:
- Levi Chamberlain (1792-1849), 228,500 words (journals)
- Lorrin Andrews (1795–1868), 24,100 words (journals)
- Peter Johnson Gulick (1796-1877), 55,800 words (autobiography)
- Dwight Baldwin (1798–1886), 139,900 words (journals)
- Elisha Loomis (1799-1836), 29,300 words (journals)
- Maria (Patton) Chamberlain (1803-1880), 69,500 words (journals)
- Richard Armstrong (1805-1860), 24,500 words (journals)
- Clarissa Chapman Armstrong (1805-1891), 81,500 words (journals and letters)
Total: 653,100 words (vers. 1.2)
Current project members are: Yoko Iyeiri, Mariko Fukunaga, Yasutaka Imai, and Akira Moriya.
Linguistic analyses
As it took us a while to compile the corpus, we are still at a preliminary stage in linguistic analyses. Most of our outcomes so far are papers presented at various conferences.
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2025. “Shall and Will in 19th-century Missionary Documents: Christian Community and American English in Honolulu”. HiSoN (Historical Sociolinguisics Network Conference) 2025, 23 May 2025, Bristol.
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2024. “When Did Americanism Begin? Adverbs with –ly in 19th-century Missionary Documents in Honolulu”, 13th Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN2024), 7 June 2024, Zurich University.
- Moriya, Akira and Yoko Iyeiri. 2020. “The Be/Have-Perfect in 19th-Century American English: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Some Missionary Documents in Hawaii”. JAECS2020, 3 October 2020, Online.
- Iyeiri, Yoko and Mariko Fukunaga. 2020. “A Corpus-based Analysis of Negation in Some 19th-century American Missionary Documents in Honolulu”. ICAME 41, 20-23 May 2020, Heidelberg (online).
- Iyeiri, Yoko, Mariko Fukunaga, and Akira Moriya. 2020. “Compiling the Hawaii Corpus and Some Linguistic Case Studies”. Workshop on “Christian documents in the Asia-Pacific region and their use”, held at Kyoto University. 1 January 2020.
Among the above presentations, Iyeiri & Fukunaga (2020) has already been published as a book chapter:
- Iyeiri, Yoko and Mariko Fukunaga. 2023. “A Corpus-based Analysis of Negation in Selected 19th-century American Missionary Documents in Honolulu”, in Language and Linguistics in a Complex World, ed. Beatrix Busse, Nina Dumrukcic, and Ingo Kleiber, pp. 133-151. Berlin: De Gruyter.
This paper discusses various aspects of negation in the Hawaii Corpus, with some focus on the negative construction of the main verb have. Interestingly, the Hawaii Corpus displays a fairly extensive use of the form have not instead of do not have, suggesting that the establishment of American do not have (as against have not) was probably later than hitherto assumed. For further details, see this page. See also the book itself is freely accessible.
