Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-331) and indexes
Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus; Editorial page; Title page; LCC page; Dedication page; Table of contents; Preface and acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Chapter 1 General introduction; Chapter 2 Previous research on the use of personal pronouns in EarlyModern English ... ; Chapter 3 Thou and you; Chapter 4 The distribution of thou and you and their variants in verse and prose; Chapter 5 "A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted / Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion"; Chapter 6 "You beastly knave, know you no reverence?"
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
