Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and
Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Heidelberg
(Anglistisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: This thesis
includes 171 pages of detailed linguistic corpus analysis as well as 36
pages of running text examining the use of thou, thee, ye and you in
Early Modern English. The corpus I will use is the diachronic
multi-genre Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, which consists of 1 572
800 words. For my investigation of the subjective and objective second
person pronouns, I will consider all 2977 occurrences of thou, thee, ye
and you (including their alternative spellings) in the 126 Early Modern
English text samples of private and official correspondence. For this
research, I will use private and official letters, since they are
essentially the only surviving text samples in which an individual is
consistently addressed. I will first analyze the use of the subjective
and objective second person pronouns in private correspondence. More
precisely, I will determine how thou, thee, ye and you (and their
alternative spellings) were used in the period of Early Modern English
and in which context they appeared. Next, I will investigate the same
four pronouns in non-private Early Modern English letters. Finally, I
will compare the use of the subjective and objective second person
pronouns in private and non-private correspondence from the first Early
Modern English period (1500 to 1570) through the second one (1570 to
1640) up to the third and last one (1640 to 1710). I will explore to
what extent a status distinction or an emotional marking is made within
these private and official letters and how each of the four pronouns
developed until only you remained. Initially, the usage of certain
second person pronouns related to social status as well. In Middle
English, ye and you were generally used by inferiors for addressing
their superiors, while thou and thee were employed by super
