Pronouns of address in English, 1580-1780: a study of form changes as reflected in British drama

Abstract

This computer-aided statistical study has examined the changes which took place in the pronouns of address in British drama during two hundred years of the Early Modern English period. This study has determined, first, that in the drama the decline of the th forms (thou, ye, thy, thyself, thine, and thee) became significant at mid-sixteenth century and that these forms were replaced by the y forms (you, your, yours, yourself, and yourselves) by the end of the eighteenth century, and that of the individual th forms, ye was the most tenacious, remaining in the drama until the end of the period studied in such frozen expressions as "hark ye" and "look ye; second, that as the th forms became archaic the greatest syntactic variations occurred with thee and ye; third, that the relative frequency of the individual y to th forms for the two-hundred-year period varied from 5:1 to 3:1. The corpus of data for this study consisted of 57,580 pronoun occurrences from sixty-two representative dramas by the twenty-nine following playwrights (parenthetical entries indicate the number of plays by each dramatist): Marlowe (2), Shakespeare (10), Jonson (2), Ford (2), Shirley (2), D'Avenant (2), Boyle (2), Dryden (2), Etherege (2), Wycherley (1), Shadwell (2), Lee (2), Otway (2), Southerne (1), Vanbrugh (2), Congreve (2), Cibber (2), Steele (2), Rowe (2), Farquhar (2), Lillo (2), Fielding (2), Edward Moore (2), Garrick (2), John Home (1), Goldsmith (2), George Colman, the elder (1), Cumberland (2), and Sheridan (2). ...