3.1 Preparation

For examining the frequencies of the possessive pronouns, it is necessary to analyse data from a corpus. The one used in this case study is Early English Prose Fiction, which is part of the Chadwyck-Healey literature collection that provides digitized editions of literature from different genres from 1500 to 1950. Before starting the corpus analysis, it is useful to check different orthographic forms of the words that are to be examined. A useful source to do so is the Oxford English Dictionary, which can be accessed under www.oed.com. The first form to be examined is thine, so the OED is used to display different orthographic forms of it.

In order to see all variant forms of the word thine it is necessary to show the full entry of the OED. After having done so, the different forms are listed as illustrated in the screen shot above. In this case, only the forms from the 16th century to the 17th century will be taken into account as the EEPF only covers this time span. As the OED search shows, other forms that need to be considered in the corpus analysis are thyne, theyne and thin. The same process is used for yours with the following results:

As for yours, only the results from 15th century onwards will be considered. These are marked in the following screen shot:

After determining different orthographic forms, the next step is collecting data in the corpus analysis.

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