Chet tilari fakultei ingliz tili kafedrasi

6. Development of the Second-Person Pronoun.

The development of the second-person pronoun in English has been a complex process, one which shows the variation available within what is considered a “closed system.” In the Middle English period, the distinct singular and plural forms were increasingly used to signify social rather than grammatical relationships. Yet, by the early eighteenth-century, this distinction was levelled in standard usage, and you assumed the functions of both the singular and plural forms.

Old English distinguished between singular þu (ME thou) and plural ge (ME ye, later you). Yet, notably, OE also contained dual pronouns to represent ‘you two,’ as opposed to ‘you many.’ Barber and Mustanoja explain how, into the Middle English period, second-person pronouns were still distinguished by number and case, thou/thee the singular forms (nominative/objective) and ye/you the plural forms, but the dual form was lost. During the sixteenth century, however, this nominative/objective distinction in the plural form would be levelled at the expense¹⁷

With the increasing influence of French, the use of ye/you was used to designate not merely the plural form, but also social difference. Indeed, the social resonance of the second-person pronoun eventually came to be more significant than the singular/plural distinction. As early as the thirteenth century, you was used as a singular pronoun of address denoting respect, one analogous to the French “vous.” Wales and Millward note the particular influence on this development of French courtly literature, which consistently employed “vous” as a pronoun of polite address. Mustanoja suggests that this deferential custom has its origins in the plural of majesty, although, according to Blake, this influence has yet to be firmly established. Nonetheless, in his survey of the use of you and thou in ME literature, Blake suggests that authors such as Chaucer and Malory became increasingly sensitive to pronoun usage, as changes in the system “opened up the possibility of nice discriminations in language use” (539)¹⁸

Although many recent studies have complicated the issue, it has been widely viewed that the adoption of you as a polite form led to the pejoration of thou and thus occasioned a development of a “power semantic” (Brown 255) in which thou became “a mark of contempt or a social marker” (Blake 536), the term of address often given by a social superior to an inferior. Thee was also used among equals of the lower class; the nobility would typically use you among themselves (Brown 256-57; Leith 107; Barber 208-9). In this way, the use of pronouns came to serve as a means not only of distinguishing one social group from another, but also as a means of consolidating affiliation, even among family members. While thoroughly acknowledging the “solidarity dimension” of pronoun usage (110), Wales, like many, insists that the use of you and thou was hardly this straightforward, pointing out that “in English usage, right from the beginning, there was always considerable fluctuation between thou and you forms in the singular” (114). Both Hope and Wales show that thou could be used to mark a range of emotions other than contempt; it could also express familiarity and intimacy. Yet although, as Wales suggests, a “master’s thou need not only indicate “condescension,” but familiarity” (114), it is certainly important to consider who has the ability to exercise choice when it comes to pronoun usage¹⁹

Sceptical about the argument Brown and Gilman make for a close correspondence between the power semantic and hierarchical social structure, Wales is among many who argue strongly for “the possibility that there was some semantic overlap between [you and thou] even as their values changed from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century” (115). This overlap in meaning and usage may have led to the eventual dominance of you: since you and thou may have been used interchangeably in informal speech, one form may no doubt have become redundant²⁰

Yet the eventual leveling of the singular and plural second-person pronoun can be attributed to a variety of factors. Increasing upward mobility may have also contributed to the eventual dominance of you, which, by the early eighteenth-century, generally took over all of the functions of thou/thee. In the Middle English and Early Modern periods, members of the expanding middle class sought to imitate polite forms of speech and to avoid those usages that would associate them with the lower classes. By the seventeenth century, polite society typically shunned thou, which had become the marked form. This was in large part the result of the use of thou and thee by religious groups such as the Quakers, who saw the older pronoun form as that which emphasized the equality of rather than the social distance between all individuals (Leith 108, Crystal 71). The continued use of thou and thee was, interestingly, the subject of much scrutiny and led to the development of a new verb, to thou, and a verbal noun, thou-ing. In a telling example from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), the working-class heroine at one point “dropped the more formal ‘you,’ with which she had addressed Miss Benson [her new guardian], and thou’d her quietly and habitually” (137)²¹

Increasingly seen as an old-fashioned form, thou thus became largely confined to Biblical and religious contexts or other specialized instances of address. It can often be found in literary contexts into the nineteenth century, particularly those which, as in Ruth, above, are associated with intimate relationships (“Were I with thee . . .” muses the speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!”). The older usage can still be found in certain dialects; West Yorkshire, for example, retains the use of tha/thee (Hogg 144). Number has also been nearly universally lost, although in certain dialects plural forms such as youse and y’all (especially in the southern United States) exist.

The development of the second-person pronoun has generated much critical debate. Studies cluster largely around the middle Early Modern period; the frequent employment of pronoun switching in Shakespearean texts renders them a common site of analysis and hypothesis. Brown and Gilman’s 1960 study and their subsequent development of “politeness theory” (1989) marks landmark work in this area.

However, since Brown and Gilman, many have argued for a much more fluid, complex set of relations between second-person pronoun address and social relationships. Seeking to point out the difficulties posed by a universal model such as that put forth by Brown and Gilman, Wales examines the multifaceted interrelation between the “pronoun system and social networks” (108). In attempting not only to chart but also to explain the reasons for the take-over by you of all the functions of thou, Wales makes the important point that while this shift has come about in English, the distinction remains common in Continental French (tu), German (du), and Russian (ty). Unlike English, in these languages, “even today, momentary shifts are rare” (114). A different case, however, could be made for Quebecois French, in which the use of “vous” when addressing superiors or strangers has, in recent decades, become increasingly less imperative.

Jonathan Hope is among many who have difficulties with the numerous approaches that treat “dramatic dialogue as if it were speech” (1993, 83). Hope seeks to analyse “accounts of ‘real’ conversations” in order “to mitigate the distortions in our knowledge of early Modern English” (1993, 83). Hope takes issue with the assertion made by Wales and others about the scarcity of evidence of spoken English, turning from literature to early court records for more “authentic” illustrations of the use of you and thou in Early Modern English. Nonetheless, he is consistent with Wales (1983), who is sceptical about studies’ heavy reliance upon literary text, which, of course, may exploit through “literary selectiveness” (108) the dramatic potential of the social weight carried by you and thou²²

The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism is an academic journal published by the Penn State University Press. Founded in 1966 by Robert W. Frank, Jr. (who continued as editor through 2002) and Edmund Reiss, The Chaucer Review acts as a forum for the presentation and discussion of research and concepts about Chaucer and the literature of the Middle Ages. The journal publishes studies of language, social and political contexts, aesthetics, and associated meanings of Chaucer's poetry, as well as articles on medieval literature, philosophy, theology, and mythography relevant to study of the poet and his contemporaries, predecessors, and audiences.

The Chaucer Review has been edited since 2001 by Susanna Fein (Kent State University) and David Raybin (Eastern Illinois University). The four annual issues are published in January, April, July, and October and are distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Past scholarly evaluations of the Early Middle English period have not been positive. In the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (1999), Thomas Hahn summarized the history of scholarship as a struggle with one of the dullest and least accessible intervals in standard literary history, an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights. J.A. Bennett and G.V. Smithers, in their edition of extracts of Early Middle English (1966), found little to challenge the traditional view that the reigns of William [the Conqueror] and his sons mark an hiatus in our literature. Even scholars who recognize shifting aesthetic standards often dismiss Early Middle English literature on the basis of principles laid down in the nineteenth century, when much of the material was first (and often last) edited. There is a tendency, as Christopher Cannon has observed, to view Early Middle English in terms of profound isolation from immediate vernacular models and examples, from any local precedent for the business of writing English (The Grounds of English Literature, 2004). But scholars have more recently begun to realize the value of Early Middle English studies, particularly within the contexts of multilingualism and manuscript culture.

The Early Middle English period was in fact a time of intense linguistic change, literary experimentation, and textual production that juggled regional specificities, emerging genres, and multilingual interactions with verve. Bracketed by the Norman Conquest and the decline of the English populace as a result of the Plague, the period is characterized by its interaction with cultural developments from Ireland to the Middle East. In addition to four main literary languages (Latin, French, English, Welsh), Britain was home to speakers and scholars of Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Norse, Arabic, and Dutch. The period embraces the most extreme changes in the English language in history; the record of dialect variations and linguistic shifts found between 1100 and 1350 are in many ways greater than those that separate Chaucer’s English from Shakespeare’s. These centuries also witnessed British crusaders’ establishment and loss of colonies in the Middle East, as well as the expulsion of Jews from England. Literature of the period frequently reflects encounters between Christians, Jews, Muslims, and heretics. This is a literary world very different from the standard views of medieval England²³

Recent scholarship has revealed a diverse and intellectually experimental textual landscape, and digital humanists and editors continue to work to meet the special challenges of access that have always existed for the period²⁴ Building on new work and creating new cross-disciplinary conversations, Making Early Middle English took as its topic the widest possible conception of the field: by period, languages, cultural and religious differences, and geographic scope. We asked how Early Middle English as a field, as context, as manuscripts, as texts, and as a multilingual phenomenon has been shaped and made, handled and mishandled. We considered the historical, global, and contextual situation of English literature and its production between 1100-1350. We explored how the period has been fashioned in its post-medieval histories, from sixteenth-century antiquarian descriptions, to twentieth-century scholarly assessments, to its current new making in digital archives. We heard presentations on a range of genres and languages, related both to English and to conceptions of Englishness in the period. Making Early Middle English was a groundbreaking event that laid the foundation and stakes of the field’s study for the foreseeable future²⁵

Among the most easily recognisable characteristics of Middle English dialects are certain differences in the conjugation of the verb. In Old English, the third person singular, and all the persons of the plural, of the present indicative ended in -th, with a difference in the preceding vowel: thus, lufian to love, l[char]ran to teach, give (in West Saxon) h[char] lufath, h[char] l[char]reth, and w[char] lufiath, w[char] [char]rath. In the northern dialect, this -th had, in the tenth century, already begun to give way to -s; and northern writings of about 1300 show -es both in the third singular and in the plural as the universal ending. The midland dialect, from 1200 onwards, had in the plural -en perhaps taken over from the present subjunctive or the past indicative; this ending, often reduced to -e, remains in the language of Chaucer. The third singular ended in -eth in midland English (so also in Chaucer); but the northern -s, which has now been adopted almost everywhere, even in rustic speech, is found in many midland writings of the fourteenth century, especially in those of the west. The southern dialect preserved the West Saxon forms with little change: we find he luveth, we luvieth in the fourteenth century. The plural indicative present of the verb to be had several quite unconnected forms in Old English sindon and b[char]oth in all dialects, earon, aron in Northumbrian and Mercian. In the thirteenth century, sinden occurs in the north midland Ormulum and some southern writings. In the fourteenth century, northern writings have are (monosyllabic), midland varies between aren or are and been, ben, while the southern form is beoth or buth²⁶

The Northumbrian dialect had, in the tenth century, already reduced the -an of the infinitive to -a, and, in the northern English of the fourteenth century, the infinitive and the first person singular present were destitute of endings (the final -e, though often written, being shown by the metre to be silent). In other dialects, the infinitive ended in -en, for which -e occurs with increasing frequency from the thirteenth century onwards. Chaucer and Gower have both forms; their metre requires the final -e to be sounded in this as in most of the other instances, but it is probable that, in ordinary speech, it was generally silent before A.D. 1400. 16

The forms of the present participle, which, in Old English, ended in -ende, afford a well-marked criterion of dialect in Middle English. The northern dialect had falland, the southern fallinde; in the midland dialect, fallande or fallende gradually gave place to fallinge, which is the form used by Chaucer.