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Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 113–130

Chapter 8
Patterns of reader involvement on sixteenth-century English title pages, with special reference to second-person pronouns

| University of Turku

Title pages may be viewed as early forms of advertisement, intended to make the potential reader purchase the book and attach a high value to its contents. In research into the consumer psychology of present-day advertisements, second-person pronouns have been found an effective means of persuasion. Based on a comprehensive dataset of sixteenth-century title page texts, this study shows that early English book producers made versatile and creative promotional use of the second-person pronouns you and thou so as to involve the potential reader (purchaser). The core of the analysis consists of a qualitative contextual analysis of the pronoun forms.

Keywords: advertising, Early Modern English, involvement, pronouns, title pages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Second-person pronouns
  • 3.Research design
  • 4.Second-person pronouns on sixteenth-century title pages
    • 4.1Quantitative overview
    • 4.2Second-person pronouns in context
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.08pei
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