Affirmatives in Early Modern English
Yes, yea and ay
This study examines the affirmatives yes, yea and ay in Early Modern English,
more specifically in the period 1560 to 1760. Affirmatives have an obvious role as responses to yes/no questions in dialogues, and
so this study demanded the kind of dialogical material provided by the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. I
examine the meanings and contexts of usage of each affirmative: their distribution across time and text-types, their collocates
and their occurrence after positive and negative questions. The results challenge a number of issues and claims in the literature,
including when the “Germanic pattern” (involving yes and yea after positive or negative
questions) dissolved, whether yea or ay were dialectal, and the timing of the rise of
ay and the fall of yea.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background to English affirmatives: Yes, yea and ay
- 2.1Etymological background
- 2.2Responses to questions: Yes and yea and the Germanic pattern
- 2.3The situation in EModE
- 3.Spelling variants
- 4.Global contexts: Time and text-types
- 4.1Distribution over time
- 4.2Distribution over text-type
- 4.3Local contexts: Collocations and preceding questions
- 4.3.1
The collocations of yes, yea and
ay
- 4.3.2Preceding questions
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
Corpora, dictionaries and tools
-
References