Reviewed by Martina Häcker, University of Paderborn

A revised version of Terry Walker’s doctoral dissertation, this volume consists of nine chapters, an appendix, references, and an index. It is thoroughly edited and contains numerous tables and three maps.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–8), introduces corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, and the theoretical framework of the study. Ch. 2, ‘Corpus and genre overview’ (9–20), describes the database; Ch. 3, ‘Data classification’ (21–38), details the sociolinguistic parameters used in the analysis; and Ch. 4, ‘Previous research on thou and you in Early Modern English’ (39–64), explores previous research. A sociolinguistic and pragmatic analysis of the data is provided in Ch. 5, ‘Thou and you in trials 1560–1760’ (65–92); Ch. 6, ‘Thou and you in depositions 1560–1760’(93–170); and Ch. 7, ‘Thou and you in drama comedy 1560–1760’ (171–236), followed by a syntactic and morphological analysis in Ch. 8, ‘The role of selected linguistic factors in thou and you usage’ (237–86). The ‘Summary and conclusion’ completes the volume in Ch. 9 (287–96).

W’s database consists of a subset of texts from A corpus of English dialogues 1560–1760. Within the categories ‘Trials’, ‘Depositions’, and ‘Drama comedy’, W includes three texts for each of the five forty-year periods. These texts are analyzed on two levels: a macro analysis, in which W presents a quantitative analysis within each genre according to the speakers’ age, sex, and rank; and a micro analysis, in which W evaluates and interprets each occurrence of thou and you in the context of the surrounding text. The micro analysis intends to discover who uses which pronoun to whom in which context and why. W finds that rank plays an important role, while age and gender are of less importance, and that thou is predominantly used to express intimacy, in-group membership among young males, and anger. Her study largely confirms the findings of previous research.

Some interesting questions could have been pursued further. Although she establishes that the regional background of the speakers and authors is an important factor in ‘Depositions’, the role of region is not explored for the other genres. The rise of thou in the period from 1600 to 1640 should also have received greater attention. Moreover, across the texts, the uneven distribution of speakers from different social categories is also a source of concern. W states ‘in my data, non-commoners are represented mainly by men, women address other women of this group only in period 1’ (166) and ‘age difference between characters is unlikely to play much of a role in the data for this period, simply because it is predominantly young characters who are represented in the data’ (224). This unevenness raises questions about the representativeness of her findings. W is aware of this and draws on the work of others to support her arguments. However, it may have been more appropriate to restrict the analysis to one genre or time period for which sufficient data is available.