Some aspects of 17th century English grammar

This book discusses three features of 17th century English, viz initial adverbial clauses, conjuncts and the noun phrase. All three chapters make use of the material collected for Bækken 2003, which is a corpus study based on approximately 2,500 pages of running text, giving just under 11,000 examples collected from three different parts of the 17th century and four different text categories, viz 'descriptive prose', 'religious prose', 'letters' and 'history'. The two chapters concerned with adverbials testify to a longitudinal increase in the use of sentence- initial elements which are only loosely connected with the rest of the sentence in which they occur. This is noticeable above all in the case of conjuncts, the use of which increases significantly across the 17th century.