Chapter published in:
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: 01 July 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.330.05wal
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