Thou And You In Early Modern English Dialogues

This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), course: English Grammar – synchronic and diachronic aspects, 18 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In Middle English and Early Modern English one could choose either You or Thou (and their respective variants see Simpson et al. 2005: entry Thou, pers., pron., 2nd sing.). Either choice carried a number of implications, depending on the period of time in the language (Barber 1976:204-210). This system, which exists in many (but predominately European) countries is generally referred to as the T/V distinction. Although similar to the German T/V distinction (Blake 1983:6), there is a phenomenon in Early Modern English, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays, which sets the You/Thou distinction apart. Whereas in German, French or Italian, it would be very rare and even rude to switch back and forth from T to V or the other way around, this must have happened quite frequently in Early Modern English dialogues (Brown and Gilman 1960:274-275). Eventually, of course, the use of Thou declined leaving the English language with only one second person pronoun, serving all cases without alteration (except possessive Yours and determiner Your) and both singular and plural (Görlach 1991:85). A speaker of Early Modern English consequently had not only the option of choosing T or V once, he or she could also switch within a conversation, sometimes within a single utterance. The choice then would carry certain implications, about the emotions of the speaker, about his fondness or dislike of the addressee, or about the social ranks of both addresser and addressee. As a result, choosing the pronoun became a tool in dialogues that could be used to acknowledge or insult. The T/V distinction will be discussed, its appearance in Early Modern English and particularly Shakespeare’s language. Then, in order to attain an achievable amount of research for a paper of this size, one of Shakespeare’s plays will be regarded with some detail. The choice fell on King Lear...

This volume provides a comprehensive account of Early Modern English, organized by linguistic level. The volume not only presents detailed outlines of the traditional language levels, it also explores key questions and debates, such as do-periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronouns and relativization, literary language (including the language of Shakespeare), and sociolinguistics, including contact and standardization.

This book analyses speech-related genres in Early Modern English, providing ideas of what spoken interaction in earlier times might have been like.

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). Alongside studies of syntax, morphology, and dialectology, published in two sister volumes, many innovative contributions focused on semantics, pragmatics and register variation. A rich variety of state-of-the-art studies and plenary lectures by acknowledged world experts in the field bears witness to the quality of the scholarly interest in this field of research. In all the contributions, well-established methods combine with new theoretical approaches, in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. The accurate peer-reviewed selection ensures the methodological homogeneity of the papers.

This book looks at mediaeval English drama using the theoretical frameworks of historical sociopragmatics and dialogue analysis. It focuses on the collection of cycle plays known as the N.Town Plays, preserved in a manuscript from the fifteenth century. The book examines various linguistic markers that are important for the expression of social relations and pragmatic stance: pronouns and terms of address, modal markers, performatives, and sequential structures such as question-answer, imperative-compliance, etc. These elements are examined separately and then brought together to arrive at a more integrated analysis of dramatic dialogue and of the dynamics of interaction it portrays. A separate chapter is devoted to tracing the same mechanisms on a different communication level, i.e. in 'dialogue' with the audience, which is particularly relevant to the instructional purposes of the plays. The book will be useful to students and scholars of pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialogue studies and drama studies.

The series Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction.