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.

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.

Publisher Description

The study of variation and change is at the heart of the sociolinguistics. Providing a wide survey of the field, this textbook is organised around three constraints on variation: linguistic structure, social structure and identity, and social and linguistic perception. By considering both structure and meaning, Scott F. Kiesling examines the most important issues surrounding variation theory, including canonical studies and terms as well as challenges to them.