Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus
Morpho-syntactic variability of second person pronouns
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.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 106] 2002. xiv, 344 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008
Published online on 21 October 2008
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
-
Preface and acknowledgements | p. xi
-
Abbreviations | p. xiii
-
1. General introduction | pp. 1–13
-
2. Previous research on the use of personal pronouns in Early Modern English with special reference to Shakespeare’s plays | pp. 15–36
-
3. Thou and you: A quantitative analysis | pp. 37–61
-
4. The distribution of thou and you and their variants in verse and prose | pp. 63–81
-
5. “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion”: Address pronouns in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and other Elizabethan poetry | pp. 83–98
-
6. “You beastly knave, know you no reverence?”: The co-occurrence of second person pronouns and nominal forms of address | pp. 99–186
-
7. “Prithee no more” vs. “Pray you, chuck, come hither”: Prithee and pray you as discourse markers | pp. 187–212
-
8. The role of grammar in the selection of thou or you | pp. 213–221
-
9. “In thine own person answer thy abuse”: The use of thy vs. thine | pp. 223–248
-
10. “Stand, sir, and throw us that you have about ye”: The syntactic, pragmatic and social implications of the pronoun ye | pp. 249–281
-
11. Summary and conclusion | pp. 283–292
-
Appendix: Mitchell’s Corpus of British Drama (1580–1780) | pp. 293–295
-
Notes | pp. 297–310
-
-
Name index | pp. 333–335
-
Subject index | pp. 337–339
“B's book is a welcome contribution to the study of the history of second person pronouns in English, emphasizing the centrality of the Shakespearean canon in this connection.”
Juhani Rudanko, University of Tampere, in Language, Vol. 82:1 (2006)
“This book contains a wealth of material which should be invaluable to all those interested in Shakespeare.”
N.F. Blake, Sheffield, in Archive für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Band 241:2 (2004)
“Overall, I think the book is important as it informs our knowledge of Shakespeare's language. Furthermore, since Busse compares his findings in the Shakespeare corpus to other Early Modern English corpora, the study carries import for our understanding of the history of English more generally. Busse's presentation proceeds logically and his claims are well supported by the data he presents. One of the most beneficial aspects of Busse's work is that it provides the reader with a lot of material that could lead to further research or prove useful for in-progress studies among individual researchers.
”
K. Aaron Smith, Illinois State University in Linguist List (April 2003)
Cited by (47)
Cited by 47 other publications
Ciambella, Fabio
Evans, Mel
Knooihuizen, Remco
Lalić, Ana
Nagy C., Katalin
Pojprasat, Somboon
Walker, Terry & Merja Kytö
2022. Chapter 5. Survival or death. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 105 ff.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Andrew Hardie, Jane Demmen, Jennifer Hughes & Matt Timperley
Graziano, Alba
Leitner, Magdalena & Andreas H. Jucker
Nakayasu, Minako
Archer, Dawn & Alison Findlay
2020. Chapter 3. Keywords that characterise Shakespeare’s (anti)heroes and villains. In Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 97], ► pp. 32 ff.
Bartali, Valentina
Demmen, Jane
Hardie, Andrew & Isolde van Dorst
Murphy, Sean, Dawn Archer & Jane Demmen
Wiśniewska-Przymusińska, Malwina
Sato, Kiriko
Sato, Kiriko
Baicchi, Annalisa, Roberta Facchinetti, Silvia Cacchiani & Antonio Bertacca
2018. Shakespeare’s language revisited in the 21st century. English Text Construction 11:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Hirt, Raffael
Jucker, Andreas H. & Joanna Kopaczyk
Shurma, Svitlana & Wei-lun Lu
Sivonen, Jari
2016. The Finnish abstract motion constructionmennäV-mA-An[go V-inf-ill] ‘do something unwished’. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 14:2 ► pp. 247 ff.
Brinton, Laurel J.
Zhan, Hongwei
2015. Review of Hilpert (2013): Constructional change in English: Developments in allomorphy, word formation, and syntax. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:1 ► pp. 257 ff.
Nevalainen, Terttu
Vallejo Zapata, Víctor Julián
Jucker, Andreas H. & Irma Taavitsainen
Mele-Marrero, Margarita & Francisco Alonso-Almeida
Keller, Stefan D.
WILLIAMS, LAWRENCE & RÉMI A. VAN COMPERNOLLE
Busse, Ulrich
2007. Review of Blake (2002): A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language & Hope (2003): Shakespeare’s Grammar. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8:1 ► pp. 127 ff.
Aalberse, Suzanne
Rudanko, Juhani
Sönmez, Margaret J-M
Nevala, Minna
Jucker, Andreas H
Jucker, Andreas H.
Jucker, Andreas H.
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General