Why and what in Early Modern English drama

This study sheds new light on the nature of the discourse markers why and what in the Early Modern English (EModE) period. It attempts to fill a gap by providing a contrastive analysis of these two markers of similar origin in the drama samples of two EModE corpora – A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English – covering the time span 1500 to 1760. The discourse markers are approached from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, so as to account for their frequency of attestation as well as their functions, with the aim of reaching a deeper understanding of the potential similarities and differences in their use and development in the course of the EModE period.