Cover not available
Part of
Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse
Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 330] 2022
► pp. 105–126

Chapter 5
Survival or death

Mine/my and thine/thy variation in Early Modern English medical writing

| Mid-Sweden University
| Uppsala University

This quantitative and qualitative study examines the chronological development of the possessive determiners mine, my, thine, and thy in the Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus (EMEMT), focusing on the influence of phonological environment and text category, as well as noting lexical items with which mine and thine commonly occur. The pattern of decline for mine and thine, the phonological context in which they are found, and the collocations identified resemble those found in previous research, but rather than occurring in more formal texts as suggested by previous research, these forms predominantly occur in the more “popular” medical text categories, those with a wider readership, and particularly in texts that are more speech-like in nature (cf. Kytö and Walker 2020).

Keywords: possessive determiners, mine, my, thine, thy, Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT), chronological development, phonological environment, collocations, formality, “popular” texts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research context
  • 3.Material and method
  • 4.Quantitative results
  • 5.The microanalysis
  • 6.Summary and concluding remarks
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 1 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.330.05wal
References

Electronic resources

Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC)
1998 Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin. Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki.Google Scholar
A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED)
2006 Compiled by Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).Google Scholar
Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT)
2010 Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, Turo Hiltunen, Martti Mäkinen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö. Software by Raymond Hickey. See Taavitsainen and Pahta (2010) below.Google Scholar
Helsinki Corpus = The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts
1991 Compiled by Matti Rissanen (Project leader), Merja Kytö (Project secretary); Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö (Old English); Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen (Middle English); Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Early Modern English). Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Barber, Charles
1976 Early Modern English. 1st edition. London: André Deutsch.Google Scholar
1997 Early Modern English. 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Busse, Ulrich
2002 Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 106. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, Martin
2013 Constructional Change in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1927 A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Volume II. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen
2014 “Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics: Intersections and Interactions.” In Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker, and Jukka Tuominen, 3–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kytö, Merja, and Terry Walker
2020 “A Standardization Process in Its Final Stages: Mine and Thine in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760.” In Standardisation and Change in Early Modern English: Empirical Approaches, ed. by Laura Esteban-Segura and Javier Calle-Martin. Special Issue of International Journal of English Studies 20(2): 95–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marttila, Ville
2010 “Recipe Collections and Materia Medica.” In Early Modern English Medical Texts. Corpus Description and Studies, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, 101–110. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg
2003 Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Pahta, Päivi, and Irma Taavitsainen
2010 “Introducing Early Modern English Medical Texts.” In Early Modern English Medical Texts. Corpus Description and Studies, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, 1–8. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena, and Terttu Nevalainen
2007 “From Mine to My and Thine to Thy: Loss of the Nasal in the First and Second Person Possessives.” In Tracing English through Time: Explorations in Language Variation, ed. by Ute Smit, Stefan Dollinger, Julia Hüttner, Gunther Kaltenböck, and Ursula Lutzky, 303–314. Vienna: Braumüller.Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph, and Karin Aijmer
2015 “Corpus Pragmatics: Laying the Foundations.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schendl, Herbert
1997 “Morphological Variation and Change in Early Modern English: My/Mine, Thy/Thine.” In Language History and Linguistic Modelling, ed. by Raymond Hickey and Stanisław Puppel, 179–191. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma, and Päivi Pahta
(eds.) 2010 Early Modern English Medical Texts. Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma, and Jukka Tyrkkö
2010 “The Field of Medical Writing with Fuzzy Edges.” In Early Modern English Medical Texts. Corpus Description and Studies, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, 57–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walker, Terry
2007 Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues: Trials, Depositions, and Drama Comedy. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar