“The Development of Non-assertive any in The Paston Letters”

The rise of any in 15th-century English

This paper discusses the gradual rise of any in the 16th century by examining the letters of the Paston family edited by Davis (1971) (with the exclusion of some minor documents such as Latin texts and inventories).

The dataset provides around 600 examples of any, the normalized frequency of which is fairly large when compared with some texts of the contemporary period. This may be due to the fact that the expansion of any is considered to be relatively early in some specific genres including letters.

The frequency of any, however, differs among the different members of the Paston family. In general, its use is more frequent in the letters written by those who were active in writing and who produced a large number of letters. Also, men tend to use any more frequently than female writers. On the basis of the distribution of any, the paper points out that the introduction of this item was a change from above.

In the final part of this paper, the relationship between the decline of multiple negation and the rise of any is considered. While the rise of any seems to be a typical feature of the London area and the south in Middle English, the decline of multiple negation is more progressive in the North than in the South. Hence, the paper argues that the relationship is, though certainly available, probably fairly loose.

Related publications

• 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. 2009. ”The Verb pray in Different Letters of the Paston Family with Special Reference to its Pragmatic Use”, in English Philology and Corpus Studies: A Festschrift in Honour of Mitsunori Imai to Celebrate his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Shinichiro Watanabe & Yukiteru Hosoya, pp. 169-83. Tokyo: Shohakusha.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “The Positioning of Adverbial Clauses in the Paston Letters”, in Meaning in the History of English: Words and Texts in Context, ed. Andreas H. Jucker, Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler, & Nicole Studer-Joho, pp. 211-229. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• 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.