Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus

1. Preface and acknowledgements; 2. Abbreviations; 3. 1. General introduction; 4. 2. Previous research on the use of personal pronouns in Early Modern English with special reference to Shakespeare's plays; 5. 3. Thou and you: A quantitative analysis; 6. 4. The distribution of thou and you and their variants in verse and prose; 7. 5. "A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted / Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion": Address pronouns in Shakespeare's Sonnets and other Elizabethan poetry; 8. 6. "You beastly knave, know you no reverence?": The co-occurrence of second person pronouns and nominal forms of address; 9. 7. "Prithee no more" vs. "Pray you, chuck, come hither": Prithee and pray you as discourse markers; 10. 8. The role of grammar in the selection of thou or you; 11. 9. "In thine own person answer thy abuse": The use of thy vs. thine; 12. 10. "Stand, sir, and throw us that you have about ye": The syntactic, pragmatic and social implications of the pronoun ye; 13. 11. Summary and conclusion; 14. Appendix: Mitchell's Corpus of British Drama (1580-1780); 15. Notes; 16. References; 17. Name index; 18. Subject index