“The verb suppose and style in Benjamin Franklin’s English: A case study of intra-writer variation”

The following article of mine has been newly published. It is a contribution to the festschrift for Professor Hiroyuki Takada, with whom I have collaborated for a long time, especially in the field of historical sociolinguistics.

Bibliographical details

Iyeiri, Yoko. 2025. “The verb suppose and style in Benjamin Franklin’s English: A case study of intra-writer variation”, in Sprachgeschichte – soziolinguistisch, pragmatisch und politisch. Festschrift für Hiroyuki Takada, ed. Stephan Elspaß, Hirofumi Hosokawa & Megumi Sato, pp. 125-139. (Germanistische Bibliothek 87). Heidelberg: Winter.

This paper consists of the following sections:

Abstract

1 Introduction
2 The Dataset: The Benjamin Franklin Corpus (BF Corpus)
3 Suppose as a private verb
4 Involved style
4.1 Overall frequencies of suppose
4.2 The grammatical subject of suppose
5 I suppose as a comment clause
6 Other uses of suppose
7 Discussion of results and final conclusion

References

The following video includes a brief summary of this paper.

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