ABSTRACT
We referred in Chapter 2 to Rissanen’s (1989) observation that in historical linguistics it is particularly important for scholars to look at the texts in which particular features are embedded and the society which produced those texts. In historical linguistics, scanning concordance lines is unlikely to be enough to provide a detailed analysis of a given feature. That is certainly the case in this book as I have read every text in both corpora. This experience suggests to me that we can go a little further than Rissanen (1989): just as a knowledge of the social context can enhance our understanding of a given feature, so analysis of a given feature may shed light on the society represented in the corpus. Two conspicuous examples of this latter process, I argue, are pronoun use in the BWC and the use of vague category markers in both the BWC and the MC. We begin with pronouns in the BWC.
