Traditional morphological studies
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 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).
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.
