Browsing by Author "Eklund, Emma"

The present research is a corpus-based study using the approaches of historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics to determine the evolution of the singular second-person pronoun thou in the genre of prose fiction from the 16th to the 19th century. The study is a mixed-method study using both quantitative and qualitative methods, and the data was compiled from the collections of Early English Prose Fiction (1500–1700), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction in the Literature Online database. The period studied in the quantitative analysis is 1560–1899, while the qualitative analysis focuses solely on the 19th century. In the quantitative analysis, the proportions of thou and you were calculated by decade to determine the overall evolution of thou in comparison to you during the period examined. The individual frequencies per decade were also normalized per 10,000 words for thou to support the analysis. In the qualitative analysis, works from the 19th century with 1–5 occurrences of thou were studied to determine the general contexts where thou was used in the 19th century. Twelve additional works with a higher occurrence of thou were chosen for detailed qualitative analysis to determine what kind of sociolinguistic or pragmatic use thou had in the 19th century. The analysis revealed that while the frequency of thou decreased during the examined period of 1560–1899, it still had various uses even in the 19th century. The most prominent contexts that were found to trigger thou were poetic sections, religious settings, and apostrophes (rhetorical addressing of a person or personified thing). Equally prominent was the sociolinguistic and pragmatic use of thou, where there was a great deal of variation in the choice between thou and you. The most prevalent sociolinguistic feature associated with the use of thou was found to be age, so that older characters often addressed younger ones with thou and received you. Thou was also found to be associated more with males than females. Thou was often found in dialectal or non-standard speech, and it was most frequently used by members of the working class, although middle and upper classes also used thou, particularly with other social equals. The most notable pragmatic use of thou was found to be its use to convey emotion—both positive, such as affection, and negative, such as contempt—and the same character could use thou to express a variety of emotions. Thou was also found to be somewhat associated with personal and intimate topics of conversation as well as vocative expressions.