This monograph provides a detailed description of the language of the Cely Letters, the earliest extant collection of commercial correspondence in English (1472-88). The authors of the letters in question are English wool merchants, members of the middle class. The focus of this corpus-based analysis is morphosyntactic, but much attention is also paid to the orthographic systems traceable in the letters. The results of the structural-functional research indicate that although the language of the Celys exhibits several new tendencies, it preserves numerous orthographic, morphological...
This monograph provides a detailed description of the language of the Cely Letters, the earliest extant collection of commercial correspondence...
