“The Verb pray in Different Letters of the Paston Family with Special Reference to its Pragmatic Use”

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Pragmatic uses of the verb pray

This paper explores the verb pray in the Paston Letters with a focus on its pragmatic uses. It used to be a full lexical verb when borrowed into English, but gradually developed pragmatic uses such as parenthetical I pray you and pray or pray thee attached to imperative sentences. The present study shows that nearly 80% of the examples of the dataset are already found in the present tense with the first person subject, implying that its use is already pretty much pragmatic in the Paston Letters.

On the other hand, different authors present slightly different tendencies: the two female authors, Agnes and Margaret, for example, are relatively conservative in the use of pray. Margaret’s letters, however, show a marked difference between earlier and later dates.

As for the complements of the verb pray, this study shows the constant decline of that-clauses and the rise of examples like I pray you come. While come in this example may look ambiguous between the imperative and the bare infinitive, the discussion in this study states that it should be interpreted as the imperative, by showing how bare infinitives are rare outside the environment of the present tense with the first person subjects. Pray is a verb that is essentially followed by that-clauses or for/to infinitives in Middle English.

Related publications

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2006. “The Development of Non-assertive any in The Paston Letters“, in Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval English: Towards the Reunion of Linguistics and Philology, ed. Michiko Ogura, pp. 19-33. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2007. ”Decline of Some Middle English Features of Negation in the Fifteenth Century: A Study of The Paston Letters“, in Language and Beyond: A Festschrift for Hiroshi Yonekuraon the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Mayumi Sawada, Larry Walker, & Shizuya Tara, pp. 249-63. Tokyo: Eichosha.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “The Verb pray in Chaucer and Caxton”, in Approaching Language Variation through Corpora: A Festschrift in Honour of Toshio Saito, ed. Shunji Yamazaki & Robert Sigley, pp. 289-306. Bern: Peter Lang.
• 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.