<i>Pray</i> in Early Modern English drama

Abstract

This study seeks to provide new insights into the development and use of pray in Early Modern English. The study is based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus , which combines the drama text samples of three different Early Modern English corpora, comprising a total of 242,561 words from a time span of 1500 to 1760. We investigate the quantitative distribution of the different forms in which pray appears during this period, and the influence of the variables of social status and gender. The aim of the current study is consequently to shed more light on the sociopragmatic nature of pray forms, and to reach a more profound understanding of their use in the Early Modern English period.