Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues

What Shall We Do with Thou? Modern Mormonism’s Unruly Usage of Archaic English Pronouns

“…Moreover, the intention of the author is presumably to entertain, and the language is often manipulated, for example, for purposes of characterization and/or humour." 18 Thus, the Terry: What Shall We Do with Thou? usage of thou and you by Shakespeare and others may have been exaggerated or manipulated in other ways to enhance dramatic effect.…”

Second-person pronouns and their relation with nominal forms of address in Late Middle English and Early Modern English personal letters

“…The letters were grouped according to the description of rank classification based on the studies done by Walker (2007) and Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1995), which was presented in the first section of the present study. The table enclosed in the appendix shows the list of chosen letters from the corpus together with the date of composition, short descriptions of the authors and addressees and their social background, the number of letters written by each author, relations between the author of the given letter and the addressee, and expected results.…”

“…Group A stands for royalty and high clergy, group B for knights and baronets, while C1 for the gentry. As far as group C2 is concerned, Walker (2007) states that it is difficult to place a group of professions in the social hierarchy, since the group does not fit into the division based on the ownership of land. He notes that in this group, various kinds of service or commerce are sources of wealth; therefore, he describes it as pretended gentry.…”

“…Furthermore, the sources from the sixteenth century reveal that the society was divided into four layers. The structure of society in the above-mentioned period is presented in the table on the following page: The table above contains a detailed description of all the levels, the division into gentry and non-gentry, and official and occupational titles (Walker 2007). In the coding system of divisions, each capital letter represents a different layer of the society.…”

Formulae and performativity in Middle English documents

“…Much work is devoted to the Early Modern English period, where research aims at the representation of spoken language in writing (e.g. in court records or testimonials, see Walker 2003;Culpeper and Kytö 2010), or focuses on the evolution of single genres (e.g. of wills in Bach 1995, of petitions and statutes in Kohnen 2001), or on the development of administrative language as a professional register (e.g.…”