Traditional morphological studies
Demonstratives
Most of my studies are syntactic, but I have published some traditional morphological studies. The following item discusses the shift from tho ‘those’ to those in the Late Middle English period. The Paston Letters shows an interesting generational change in the choice between tho and those.
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2022. “From Tho to Those in Fifteenth-Century English”, in Variational Studies on Pronominal Forms in the History of English, ed. Yoko, Iyeiri, Jeremy Smith, Hiroshi Yadomi & David Selfe, pp. 21-35. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Also, my collaborative book entitled Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125 includes a section on demonstratives. In this particular text, the form is more or less constantly tho, though there is a single instance of those (i.e. those sawles).
Nouns
Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125 includes a section on nouns. It discusses plural forms of nouns and show that the –en type is observed with ‘eye’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’, and ‘child’. The spelling can be -en, –ene, –yn, and –yne. Also, the plural ending –us is available (thyngus) in the same 15th-century text.
Personal pronouns
Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125 (by Mayumi Taguchi and Yoko Iyeiri, 2019) includes a section on personal nouns in the Introduction. The choice between my and myn/myne and between thy and thyn/thyne is conditioned by whether the following noun begins with a consonant or a verb. When the following noun begins with h, myn/myne and thyn/thyne are consistently used, while my and thy are used before vowels in Peysian Meditations. This section also discusses variant forms of ‘she’ (she, he, hue) and ‘they’ (they, thay, hy; hem, hym, thaym).
Adjectives
Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125 includes a section on adjectives, where the existence or absence of the ending –e is discussed. The definite and indefinite rule seems to apply to this text very loosely. There are a number of exception. In the comparative, the suffix –er and periphrastic more are both used. The periphrastic type is employed even when the adjective is mono-syllabic, as in more hard and more strong.
As for contemporary English, I have the following publication, which discusses morpho-syntactic aspects of English comparative and superlative constructions.
- Watanabe, Ayano and Yoko Iyeiri. 2020. “Explaining the Variability of Adjective Comparatives and Superlatives: Entering the Twenty-first Century”. Word 66(2): 71-97.
This paper explores the choice between inflectional and periphrastic comparative and superlative forms of the following adjectives: ample, bitter, common, complete, costly, deadly, empty, friendly, kindly, likely, obscure, remote, robust, severe, simple, sober, and wealthy.
Verbs
As for verbs, my book entitled Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses (Abingdon: Routledge) includes some sections discussing morphological issues, e.g. forget (forgot vs. forgotten), work (wrought), drink (drank vs. drunk), and speak (spoke vs. spoken).
