"Mind your p's and q's": or the peregrinations of an apostrophe in 17th Century English

If the use of the apostrophe in contemporary English often marks the Saxon genitive, it may also indicate the omission of one or more let-ters. Some writers (wrongly?) use it to mark the plural in symbols or abbreviations, visual-ised thanks to the isolation of the morpheme "s". This punctuation mark was imported from the Continent in the 16th century. During the 19th century its use was standardised. However the rules of its usage still seem problematic to many, including literate speakers of English. "All too often, the apostrophe is misplaced", or "errant apostrophes are springing up every-where" is a complaint that Internet users fre-quently come across when visiting grammar websites. Many of them detail its various uses and misuses, and attempt to correct the most common mistakes about it, especially its mis-use in the plural, called greengrocers' apostro-phes and humorously misspelled "greengro-cers apostrophe's". While studying English travel accounts published in the seventeenth century, we noticed that the different uses of this symbol may accompany various models of metaplasms. We were able to highlight the linguistic variations of some lexemes, and trace the origin of modern grammar rules gov-erning its usage

Mary Astell's words in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (part I), a lexicographic inquiry with NooJ

International audienceIn the following article we elected to study with NooJ the lexis of a 17 th century text, Mary Astell's seminal essay, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, part I, published in 1694. We first focused on the semantics to see how Astell builds her vindication of the female sex, which words she uses to sensitise women to their alienated condition and promote their education. Then we studied the morphology of the lexemes (which is different from contemporary English) used by the author, thanks to the NooJ tools we have devised for this purpose. NooJ has great functionalities for lexicographic work. Its commands and graphs prove to be most efficient in the spotting of archaic words or variants in spelling. Introduction In our previous articles, we have studied the singularities of 17 th century English within the framework of a diachronic analysis thanks to syntactical and morphological graphs and thanks to the dictionaries we have compiled from a corpus that may be expanded overtime. Our early work was based on a limited corpus of English travel literature to Greece in the 17 th century. This article deals with a late seventeenth century text written by a woman philosopher and essayist, Mary Astell (1666–1731), considered as one of the first English feminists. Astell wrote her essay at a time in English history when women were "the weaker vessel" and their main business in life was to charm and please men by their looks and submissiveness. In this essay we will see how NooJ can help us analyse Astell's rhetoric (what point of view does she adopt, does she speak in her own name, in the name of all women, what is her representation of men and women and their relationships in the text, what are the goals of education?). Then we will turn our attention to the morphology of words in the text and use NooJ commands and graphs to carry out a lexicographic inquiry into Astell's lexemes