An Enquiry into the Occurrences of Pronouns of Address (POAs) in Natural Speech of the Elizabethan Society

The roles of power, ideology and distance are the key factors in any communication activity which determine the choice of lexical elements and the pattern of conversation. This paper aims to analyse the conversational patterns prevalent in the Elizabethan era and the reasons behind a particular choice from the wide range of pronouns of address and their relative forms which were prominently used during the period. In this regard, the Shakespearean dramatic discourse of Macbeth is considered to conduct the study. Plays are formulated in the form of conversation. Thus, this particular genre of literature can be the best available corpus to understand the natural speech patterns. Through this research study, an analytical linguistic enquiry has been conducted about the varied forms of addresses which depend not only on the addresser and the addressee but also on the stage in conversation, psychological situation of the participants, the types of speech patterns they are involved in and also on the identity related to social power and class.