Historical Perspective on Suffixed Second Person Pronouns: a Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The present work provides a detailed picture of the forms, frequencies and functions of suffixed second person pronouns (e.g. yous) since their first occurrence in English until the 2000s. It is a corpus-based study which aims to expand and refine the already existing definitions of suffixed second person forms in the literature. For the first time in scholarly work, the paper traces the historical evolution of both the frequencies and functions of suffixed second person pronouns and identifies grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation as the underlying processes of language change of these features.