Cover not available
Article published In:
Dialogues in Diachrony: Celebrating Historical Corpora of Speech-related Texts
Edited by Merja Kytö and Terry Walker
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19:2] 2018
► pp. 243–264

Affirmatives in Early Modern English

Yes, yea and ay

| Lancaster University

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.

Keywords: affirmatives, ay , Early Modern English, response forms, yea , yes
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
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00021.cul
References

Corpora, dictionaries and tools

A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED)
2006 Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).Google Scholar
CQPweb
Created by Andrew Hardie (Lancaster University). See: https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/.
Early English Books Online: Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP)
Phase II release, accessed via CQPweb.
OED (Oxford English Dictionary) Online
. June 2017 Oxford University Press. See: [URL]
Archer, Dawn
2005 Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey N. Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Blake, Norman
2002 A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blayney, Peter W.
1991 The First Folio of Shakespeare: In Conjunction with the Exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC April 1, 1991–September 21 1991 Washington, District of Columbia: Folger Shakespeare Library.Google Scholar
Crystal, David and Ben Crystal
2002 Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kytö
2000 “Data in Historical Pragmatics: Spoken Interaction (re)Cast as Writing”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (2): 175–199. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Filppula, Markku
1999 The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Filppula, Markku and Juhani Klemola
(eds) 2009 “Re-evaluating the Celtic Hypothesis”. (Special issue.) English Language and Linguistics 21: 283–330.Google Scholar
van Gelderen, Elly
2013 “Null Subjects in Old English”. Linguistic Inquiry 44 (2): 271–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond
2012 “Early English and the Celtic Hypothesis”. In Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, 496–507. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian
2004 “ Using the OED Quotations Database as a Corpus – a Linguistic Appraisal”. ICAME Journal 281: 17–30.Google Scholar
Rusten, Kristian A.
2013 “Empty Referential Subjects in Old English Prose: A Quantitative Analysis”. English Studies 94 (8): 970–992. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salmon, Vivian
1965 “Sentence Structures in Colloquial Shakespearian English”. Transactions of the Philological Society 64 (1): 105–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vennemann, Theo
2009 “Celtic Influence in English? Yes and No”. English Language and Linguistics 131: 309–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walkden, George
2013 “Null Subjects in Old English”. Language Variation and Change 251: 155–178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wallage, Phillip and Wim Van der Wurff
2013 “On Saying ‘yes’ in Early Anglo-Saxon England”. Anglo-Saxon England 421: 183–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wikberg, Kay
1975 Yes-No Questions and Answers in Shakespeare’s Plays: A Study in Text Linguistics. Åbo: Åbo Akademi.Google Scholar