Mid Sweden 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).

This study concerns the development of the determiners MINE/MYand THINE/THYin the Early Modern English period. The -Nforms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell intodisuse before words starting with initial vowels and h. While the rise of the N-less variants has been the object of several previous studies, the present investigation aims at accounting for the fate of the declining N-variants in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a data source comprising speech-related texts. We look into the chronological stages of development for the declining MINEand THINE forms, the genres that maintained these forms longest, and the speaker groups that were the last to use the forms. Comparisons are made with the results obtained in previous studies on MINE/MYand THINE/THY variation.

Cet article décrit une ressource électronique contenant des textes qui représentent le discours oral du passé de l’anglais moderne naissant. La ressource en question est A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, un corpus de 1.2 million de mots comprenant cinq genres : les rapports de procès, dépositions de témoins, pièces de théâtre, oeuvres didactiques et la prose fictionnelle. Les procès et les dépositions représentent des dialogues authentiques avec l’intervention minimale d’un scripteur et les autres genres constituent des dialogues construits par des auteurs connus ou anonymes. Nous décrivons les propriétés des genres inclus dans ce corpus et les illustrons en commentant des extraits tirés du corpus. Après avoir présenté les recherches effectuées jusqu’à présent sur la base de ce matériel, nous concluons en décrivant les différentes versions du corpus disponibles pour les utilisateurs.

This chapter investigates the form, frequency, and function of speech reporting expressions in Early Modern English, such as quod she in “I perceiue now [$ (quod she) $] how mishap doth follow me” (CED, D1FGASCO, 1573). We focus on the use in the prose fiction texts in Periods 1 and 3 in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED). The study points to developments over time, in the distribution of individual verbs as well as groups of verbs with similar functions. Variation is also evident in the word order of the speech reporting expression in relation to the represented speech and in the internal order of the speech reporting expressions (subject+verb or verb+subject).