Social Networks And Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies In Morphosyntactic Variation In The Paston Letters (1421-1503) (Topics in English Linguistics

This is the first page of introduction.
The present study deals with morphosyntactic variation in the late Middle English Paston letters. The three central linguistic variables are the third person plural pronouns, relativization patterns, and light verb constructions. This study is basically couched in the framework of historical socio-linguistics, and in particular social networl analysis. .......