Abstract
This study sheds new light on the nature of the discourse markers why and what in the Early Modern English (EModE) period. It attempts to fill a gap by providing a contrastive analysis of these two markers of similar origin in the drama samples of two EModE corpora – A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English – covering the time span 1500 to 1760. The discourse markers are approached from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, so as to account for their frequency of attestation as well as their functions, with the aim of reaching a deeper understanding of the potential similarities and differences in their use and development in the course of the EModE period.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: a Multi-Dimensional Approach |
| Editors | Markus, Manfred, Iyeiri, Yoko and Heuberger, Reinhard |
| Place of Publication | Amsterdam |
| Publisher | John Benjamins |
| Pages | 177 - 189 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9789027274977 |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |
Austrian Classification of Fields of Science and Technology (ÖFOS)
- 602004 General linguistics
- 602011 Computational linguistics