Benjamin Franklin’s English: 18th-century English
Since 2015, I have been working on Benjamin Franklin’s English, with the aim of exploring the linguistic trends in 18th-century American English. The book entitled Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses (Abingdon: Routledge) is a major outcome of this project, which was published in 2025. The project is still continuous.
The book project
In the process of writing Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses, I presented some papers at different conferences, including:
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2023. “Exceeding Welcome vs. Exceedingly Welcome: Adverbs with and without –ly in Benjamin Franklin’s English”. 12th Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN 2023), 1 June 2023, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2021. “Exploring Benjamin Franklin’s English: A Case of Intra-Writer Variation”. ICAME 42, 18-21 August 2021, Dortmund. (Online presentation, 20 August 2021)
- Iyeiri, Yoko. “Negation in Benjamin Franklin’s Writings: A Stylistic Analysis of his Autobiography and Letters”. The Fourth Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (17-20 Sepember 2018), 19 September 2018, Takamatsu, Japan.
The last one was published in the conference proceedings, but the overall content has been incorporated into Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses, where it is referred to as Iyeiri (2018).
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Negation in Benjamin Franklin’s Writings: A Stylistic Analysis of his Autobiography and Letters”, in Proceedings of the 4th Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2018), Takamatsu, Japan, September 17-19, ed. Yukio Tono and Hitoshi Ishihara, pp. 178-183. (Downloadable PDF) Also downloadable at http://apcla.net/Proc.zip (large)
After the publication of Benjamin Franklin’s English
This project is still continuous. I have just completed a research into the verb suggest in Benjamin Franklin’s English and intend to publish its result soon.
