On the trend of variants and the usage for same and each through the Helsinki Corpus

Abstract

The current paper aims to examine the trend of variants and the usage for same and each respectively based on the Helsinki Corpus. Seemingly, these two words are not thoroughly related with each other in that there is no overlapped area in their meaning, orthography and pronunciation. During the Old English (450~1100 years) and Middle English period (1100~1500 years), however, these two words had similar forms of variants as sharing one form of their etymons, ilk. With using AntConc, not only multiple types of variants from several etymons for each word but also a dominant form which has the highest number of occurrences for each period was investigated. As a result, the restricted forms of variants for both same and each as well as the correlation in appearance of a dominant variant from each etymon were captured. In addition, it was found what the grammatical and syntactical constructions dominantly used during a particular period and how they have been developed as being similar to the current usage in contemporary English.