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Article published In: Dialogues in Diachrony: Celebrating Historical Corpora of Speech-related Texts
Edited by Merja Kytö and Terry Walker
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19:2] 2018
► pp. 243–264

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Affirmatives in Early Modern English

Yes, yea and ay

 | Lancaster University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 February 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00021.cul
Abstract
This study examines the affirmatives yes, yea and ay in Early Modern English, more specifically in the period 1560 to 1760. Affirmatives have an obvious role as responses to yes/no questions in dialogues, and so this study demanded the kind of dialogical material provided by the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. I examine the meanings and contexts of usage of each affirmative: their distribution across time and text-types, their collocates and their occurrence after positive and negative questions. The results challenge a number of issues and claims in the literature, including when the “Germanic pattern” (involving yes and yea after positive or negative questions) dissolved, whether yea or ay were dialectal, and the timing of the rise of ay and the fall of yea.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background to English affirmatives: Yes, yea and ay
    • 2.1Etymological background
    • 2.2Responses to questions: Yes and yea and the Germanic pattern
    • 2.3The situation in EModE
  • 3.Spelling variants
  • 4.Global contexts: Time and text-types
    • 4.1Distribution over time
    • 4.2Distribution over text-type
    • 4.3Local contexts: Collocations and preceding questions
      • 4.3.1 The collocations of yes, yea and ay
      • 4.3.2Preceding questions
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora, dictionaries and tools
  • References
References (22)
Corpora, dictionaries and tools
A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED). 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
CQPweb. Created by Andrew Hardie (Lancaster University). See: https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/.
Early English Books Online: Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). Phase II release, accessed via CQPweb.
OED (Oxford English Dictionary) Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. See: [URL]
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Wallage, Phillip & Wim van der Wurff
2025. On analysing fragments: the case of No?. Linguistics 63:1 ► pp. 55 ff. DOI logo

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