ProTag Constructions in Early Modern English

Data collected from 1st December 2017 to 30th April 2019. To search for examples of ProTags, the selected editions were identified in Early English Books Online (EEBO https://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), and the link to their EEBO-TCP text followed, giving the entire text in a single browser window. A browser extension called Multi-highlight was used to highlight all demonstrative and nominative-form personal pronouns in the text. This extension allows the user to input multiple search strings, and highlights them all at once in the browser. One pronoun was searched at a time, but with multiple variants of spelling. This accounted for spelling and orthography variants common to EModE, for example “yov” or “yow” for ‘you’. Given EEBO-TCPs literal transcription of the original text, we also checked for common typographical variations such as a double v for w, and errors such as “yon” for “you”. Once searched, Multi-highlight highlights each form in a different colour, allowing the user to scroll through the entire text and easily locate and check each pronoun. If a pronoun was identified as a potential ProTag, it was collected into a spreadsheet. These were later read more closely, referring to the context as necessary, and confirmed or rejected as ProTags. Each ProTag was located in a standard edition of the playwrights’ works to allocate it line and scene numbers for reference purposes. The editions used for this purpose were ‘The New Oxford Shakespeare’ (2016), ‘The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online’ (2014) and ‘Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays’ (1999). REFERENCES Bevington, David, Martin Butler & Ian Donaldson (eds.), (2014). ‘The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnett, Mark Thornton (ed.), (1999). ‘Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays’. London: Everyman. Taylor, Gary, John Jowett, Terri Bourus & Gabriel Egan (eds.), (2016). ‘The New Oxford Shakespeare’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. It is possible to add an expression known as a tag to a clause in English: “It’s useful, ISN’T IT?” or “He likes me, DOESN’T HE?”, where the tag appears in capital letters. Some speakers of British English also use lone pronouns as tags (ProTags), as in “It’s useful, THAT” or “He likes me, HIM” (Mycock 2019). A similar construction is found in earlier varieties of English; for instance, in Early Modern English: “I dare be sworne hee scornes thy house HEE” (Jonson, ‘Every Man In His Humour’) or ‘Tis good Tobacco THIS! (Jonson, ‘The Alchemist’). However the features and functions of this construction in Early Modern English (EModE), and the extent to which these are similar to those of the ProTag constructions that exist in varieties of Present Day British English (PDBE), had not, until this project, been the subject of systematic investigation. In this study, we sought to identify ProTag constructions in the EModE dramatic works of three playwrights: Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare