A Corpus-based Diachronic Study On English Personal Pronouns

Language variation and change has attracted the attention of linguists for a long time.As a word class of highly frequent use,personal pronouns are an important grammatical category in the English language.Compared to the massive qualitative studies on English personal pronouns,quantitative ones are quite limited in number,of which diachronic ones are even less.English personal pronouns belong to closed-class words with rather fixed members,which are believed to be one of the most conservative parts of grammar.But in fact,language never stops changing,so do the English personal pronouns.Variation is quite common in language use,which refers to expressing similar content in more ways than one.Diachronic change entails synchronic variation,but not vise versa.Although variation does not necessarily lead to complete change,it reflects change from the synchronic perspective,so diachronic linguistic study should consider both synchronic and diachronic dimensions.Based on synchronic and diachronic English corpora(including COHA,AIS,Friends,Google Books Ngram Viewer,Desperate Housewives,BNC,COCA and TIME,with the time span of over 200 years from the end of 18^th century till recent years),the present thesis investigates the synchronic variation and diachronic change of English personal pronouns with representative case studies:summarizes the diachronic trends of changes;analyzes the influencing factors underlying change with linguistic theories such as grammaticalization,variationist sociolinguistics and sociolinguistic typology,as well as the evidence from typological perspective;and generalizes the quantitative characteristics from the diachronic data.English has abundant variational usages in personal pronouns with regard to gender,number and case.Disagreement in gender can be found in English personal pronoun usages.Possessives in anaphoric reference to compound indefinite pronouns are selected as the topic of the case study.With no specialized epicene pronouns,there are many candidates for this function in English.Statistics indicate that their is increasingly used as the epicene pronoun compared with the decline of his.This is influenced by social factors such as feminist movement,as well as the semantics and frequency of antecedents.Their?plural?used in anaphoric reference to various indefinite pronouns?singular in form?can also be treated as number variation in third person pronouns,and the trend that their in place of his can also be treated as change in number category.Number variation can be found in first,second and third person pronouns,especially the plural ones used for singular reference.The second person plural pronoun you has ousted the original singular forms in the history.The first person plural pronoun we used for singular reference is quite common among native speakers and shows a significant increase over time.More significant tendencies are detected in spoken register,but there are no considerable differences between male speakers and female ones.Elements with plural meaning are added to the original first and second person plural pronouns as a method of renewal of plural forms.The singularization over time and renewal through reinforcement are supported by typological evidence which is motivated by the intention to show politeness and modesty and to build up alliances.There is also variation in case category.Subjectives are only dominant in preverbal sentence-initial positions,objectives are increasingly used in default case environments instead of subjectives.Possessives decreased over time in general and show tendencies to be replaced by objectives in collocation with V-ing forms.The competition among three cases are influenced by the interaction of language-internal factors such as phonological,morphological and syntactic ones,as well as language-external determinants including language contact.Case category is not essential in grammar,decline and syncretism can easily happen when other methods with equivalent functions exist.From the typological perspective,case category in English is more likely to further simplify in the background of globalization.Language variation and change are influenced by determinants including structural ones such as phonological erosion,functional ones such as the principle of economy and expressing politeness in communication,as well as social ones such as feminist movement and language contact.The present research also finds a conformity of the diachronic statistics from English personal pronouns with the S-curve function,which adds evidence to the quantitative model for the diffusion of language change.In the meantime,our data contradict the constant rate hypothesis whose general applicability still remains to be verified.Lexical diffusion theory can well explain phonological change as well as grammatical change.Frequency and constructions are key elements in the study of language variation and change.Changing tendencies could be observed based on the diachronic frequencies of related constructions.High frequency might cause reduction effect or conserving effect on changes,but no matter what,the rates of innovative forms in place of the old ones are faster in later starting environments.