Abstract: Abstract Due to their largely non-routinized forms and their not being retrievable in computerised corpus searches, refusals have hitherto not been examined from a diachronic perspective. The present paper presents an inventory of refusal strategies in Early Modern English drama texts. Five comedies from two periods (1560–1599 and 1720–1760), respectively, taken from the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (Kytö and Culpeper 2006) were examined manually and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis lead to an alternative ...
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