Maybe: Development and Topic Marking
Journal Title: Token: A Journal of English Linguistics - Year 2016, Vol 5, Issue 1
Abstract
This paper discusses the development of maybe and related expressions (i.e., it may be, mayhap) in the history of English. I provide a quantitative analysis of their long‑term histories by drawing on the OED and its quotations database, along with data from two different datasets, namely, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0, and the Brown family of corpora. After extracting their instances from the datasets, this study analyzes the data to determine the position in which maybe is used the most within a clause. The results of the analysis indicate that both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were crucial periods for the development of maybe. In addition, I further demonstrate that the target adverb, over time, began exhibiting features of a topic marker, and that the development has also interwoven with the process of subjectification.
Authors and Affiliations
Daisuke Suzuki
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP335638
- DOI -
- Views 162
- Downloads 0
The Gazette de Londres: Disseminating news and exercising news management through translation
This article compares the contents and language of the preeminent English Restoration newspaper, the London Gazette, with those of its French edition the Gazette de Londres. Founded in 1665, and coming out twice a week,...
A historical study of the English modal adverbs: Evidence from a combination of diachronic corpora.
This study sheds light on the historical development of the modal adverbs doubtless, indeed, maybe, no doubt, of course, and perhaps from a functional perspective. By analyzing corpus data, I discuss, stage by stage, how...
Words of religious dissent in eighteenth-century Italian translations of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia
Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728) is the first relevant reference work of eighteenth-century British encyclopaedism. The impact of Chambers’s work was so widespread that in a...
Social identities in an institutional network: Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century
This paper offers a sociopragmatic analysis of the correspondence of the British Colonial Office pertaining to the colonisation of the Cape of Good Hope in the early nineteenth century. This setting poses fascinating que...
The poor in seventeenth-century England: A corpus based analysis
This paper examines changing perceptions of poor people in seventeenth-century England by means of a corpus analysis of the phrase the poor as it appears in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) corpus. We address the ch...