The Manufactured Homespun Style of John Bunyan's Prose 1

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 18; p. 107
• Main Author: Coleman, Julie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2014
• Subjects: American literature; British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); English literature; Lewis, C S (1898-1963); Prose
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Text files were downloaded from Project Gutenberg and Early English Books Online (EEBO) and corrected against EEBO document images.7 Alan Reed's Simple Concordance Program 4.0.7 facilitated the analysis,8 but it is based upon examination of individual contexts rather than mechanical counts. The historically singular thou had been progressively replaced by what were originally plural you-forms from the thirteenth century onwards, under the influence of Latin or of French courtly literature.34 By the early Modern English period, you was used with sufficient frequency that it is the selection of thou that has to be explained, with suggested factors including high versus low levels of discourse or education; religious affiliation; differences in status, age or gender; family relationships; informality; intimacy, affection or heightened emotion; the deliberate selection of a less polite variant with the intention to insult; dialect variation and grammatical context. Walker used corpus data selected to represent the nearest possible approximation to spoken language in order to examine the evidence for all of these possibilities and found that thou is used at a rate of 3% in trials, 33% in depositions and 10% in drama comedy in texts from the period 1640-1679.35 In each context different factors play a role: in trials and depositions thou is often used in formulaic contexts such as sentencing and exchanging vows, though Walker found little evidence that grammatical context conditioned pronoun selection except in a limited range of fixed expressions.36 In drama comedy there is a tendency towards thou in asides and apostrophe. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 137-51 (pp. 138-9) argues that Bunyan used the sixteenth-century Geneva Bible in his earlier works, but switched to the King James later in life. Because this paper is concerned with the archaisms of Biblical translations in general rather than direct quotation, all references are to the King James Bible without distinction. 13 Anthony Warner, 'DO with Weak Verbs in early Modern English', in Analysing Older English, ed.