Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second Person PronounsThis study investigates the morpho-syntactic variability of the second person pronouns in the Shakespeare Corpus, seeking to elucidate the factors that underlie their choice. The major part of the work is devoted to analyzing the variation between you and thou, but it also includes chapters that deal with the variation between thy and thine and between ye and you. Methodologically, the study makes use of descriptive statistics, but incorporates both quantitative and qualitative features, drawing in particular on research methods recently developed within the fields of corpus linguistics, socio-historical linguistics and historical pragmatics. By making comparisons to other corpora on Early Modern English the work does not only contribute to Shakespeare studies, but on a broader scale also to language change by providing new and more detailed insights into the mechanisms that have led to a restructuring of the pronoun paradigm in the Early Modern period. |
Contents
Chapter 1 General introduction | 1 |
Chapter 2 Previous research on the use of personal pronouns in EarlyModern English | 15 |
Chapter 3 Thou and you | 37 |
Chapter 4 The distribution of thou and you and their variants in verse and prose | 63 |
Chapter 5 A womans face with Natures own hand painted Hast thou the master mistress of my passion | 83 |
Chapter 6 You beastly knave know you no reverence? | 99 |
Chapter 7 Prithee no more vs Pray you chuck come hither | 187 |
Chapter 8 The role of grammar in the selection of thou or you | 213 |
Chapter 10 Stand sir and throw us that you have about ye | 249 |
Chapter 11 Summary and conclusion | 283 |
Notes | 297 |
References | 311 |
Name index | 333 |
337 | |
The PRAGMATICS AND BEYOND NEW SERIES | 340 |
Chapter 9 In thine own person answer thy abuse | 223 |
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Common terms and phrases
16th century 17th century address pronouns adjectives Amsterdam/Philadelphia analysis Benedick blank verse Brown and Gilman Chapter Claudio Comedies Histories Tragedies context contrast cousin diachronic discourse discourse markers discourse particle distribution drama Elizabethan EModE English examples factors Falstaff forms of address frequent function genre gentleman grammar Histories Tragedies Total husband imperatives instances investigation King knave lady language Leonato lexical liege linguistic lord markedness markers master mistress Nevalainen nominative occur Othello plural politeness pragmatic pray thee pronominal pronoun combined pronoun switching pronoun usage pronouns co-occurring rascal ratio Raumolin-Brunberg relationship rogue Schmidt and Sarrazin second person pronouns Shakespeare Corpus Shakespeare’s plays Shakespeare's sonnets singular sirrah sociolinguistic Sonnet 13 sonnets speaker Spevack syntactic Table term of endearment text types thou thy/thine variation verbs verse and prose villain vocatives vowel wife ye tokens