2.2 Case study

The present webpage will exemplify the different measures of central tendencies by a change the personal pronoun system: Whereas the singular forms of thou, thee, thy and thine were common in older forms of English, the plural forms of the second person, i.e.  ye, you, your and yours were generalized in the Early Modern English period and thus the distinction between the singular and the plural in the second person was no longer made. This development was probably fostered by French influence during the Middle English period, as the French plural form vous was used for politely addressing superiors. Thus, the singular forms were mainly still used in private in the 16th century, and about two centuries later the forms are found only marginally (Nevalainen 2006: 80). On this webpage, the frequencies of the possessive pronouns thine and yours are examined by using the methods mentioned in Section 2.1. (It has to be kept in mind that the two forms are not fully equivalent since yours functioned only as a possessive pro-form while thine also continued to be used as a possessive determiner before vowel- and <h>-initial words. Moreover, yours can represent singular and plural possessors while thine continued to be used only in the singular. For a more in-depth study, the occurrences of thine as well as yours would thus have to be manually checked for interchangeability.) The main goal is, however, to illustrate the use of different quantification methods in practice.

Created with the Personal Edition of HelpNDoc: Full-featured Kindle eBooks generator