Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic variability of second person pronouns

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John Benjamins Publishing, Nov 29, 2002 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 344 pages
This 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.

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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
Subject index
337
The PRAGMATICS AND BEYOND NEW SERIES
340
Copyright

Chapter 9 In thine own person answer thy abuse
223

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