Affirmatives in Early Modern English:Yes, yea and ay

Culpeper, Jonathan Vaughan (2019) Affirmatives in Early Modern English:Yes, yea and ay. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 19 (2). 243–264. ISSN 1566-5852

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Abstract

This study examines the affirmatives yes, yea and ay in Early Modern English, more specifically in the period 1560 to 1760. Affirmatives have an obvious role as responses to yes/no questions in dialogues, and so this study demanded the kind of dialogical material provided by the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. I examine the meanings and contexts of usage of each affirmative: their distribution across time and text-types, their collocates and their occurrence after positive and negative questions. The results challenge a number of issues and claims in the literature, including when the “Germanic pattern” (involving yes and yea after positive or negative questions) dissolved, whether yea or ay were dialectal, and the timing of the rise of ay and the fall of yea.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1203
Subjects:
?? LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGELANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS ??
ID Code:
127916
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
02 Oct 2018 08:52
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
20 Sep 2023 01:15