“Interpreting Different Types of Linguistic Variation: hit and it in Middle English”.
The shift from the personal pronoun hit to it in Middle English is a case of h-dropping. This study discusses the coexistence of the two forms in a single text by focusing on how they are distributed in different parts of it, and shows that there are some patterns in intra-text variation. The text analyzed mainly is Nicholas Love’s Speculum Vite Cristi (1494).