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Part of
Unlocking the History of English: Pragmatics, prescriptivism and text types
Edited by Luisella Caon, Moragh S. Gordon and Thijs Porck
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 364] 2024
► pp. 60–84

Gender, genre, and prescriptivism

Eighteenth-century female playwrights’ use of you was and you were

| Independent
| University of Toronto
This paper extends our previous study of you was and you were in eighteenth-century English drama, examining trends following Robert Lowth’s proscription of you was in his grammar (1762) and complementing Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s (2002) and Laitinen’s (2009) studies of different genres. Comparing close readings of plays by four female playwrights to the same writers’ novels, we find you was used increasingly after 1762 to indicate negative emotion and moments of dramatic significance, not unlike contemporary theatrical thou (Nonomiya 2021). Qualitatively, we confirm that you was had specifically theatrical functions, signalling deception and provocation (often by younger characters) and loss of control (often by older characters). We identify these disparate but recurrent meanings and personae with Eckert’s (2008) concept of the indexical field.
Keywords: eighteenth-century British English, second-person pronoun, gender, normative linguistics, prescriptivism, historical sociolinguistics, qualitative methods, dramatic literature, comedy, style-shifting, indexical field, enregisterment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Context
  • 3.Methods
  • 4.A broadly quantitative overview
  • 5.Accounting for idiolects: The authors
    • 5.1Frances (Chamberlaine) Sheridan (1724–1766)
    • 5.2Elizabeth (Griffith) Griffith (1727–1793)
    • 5.3Charlotte (Ramsay) Lennox (1730/31?–1804)
    • 5.4Dorothea (Mallet) Celesia (1738–1790)
    • 5.5The insufficiency of demographics
  • 6.Dramatic functions of you was: Layered contributing factors
    • 6.1Insults, lies, and teasing
    • 6.2Anger, offense, and “being out of control”
    • 6.3Modeling the indexical field of you was
  • 7.Discussion: Comparison with contemporary and earlier male playwrights
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.364.03hye
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