The emergence of a pragmeme during the Middle English period

•Initial voiced interdental fricative emerges from Middle to Present Day English.•A result of language contact, changes in the grammar, and functional pressures.•edh pragneme reliably cues mutually identifiable information in English discourse.

During the Middle English period, speakers exploited the newly emerging voiced interdental fricative phoneme to create the ubiquitous edh initial pragmeme found in Present Day English. Treating the emergence of the initial voiced interdental fricative as a purely phonological phenomenon that was manifested on members of a range of syntactic classes is problematic, as there is no specific phonetic environment against which to predict voicing of the members of just and exactly the contemporary set. How then can the appearance of this group of otherwise dissimilar lexemes have arisen? Traditional analyses fail to consider words with this initial voiced interdental fricative as a set, thus failing to identify the functional motivation driving the development of this pragmeme that consolidated and elaborated the role it plays in the modern language. This study explores the development of these words as a pragmatic form class during the Middle English and Early Modern English periods and then reviews their place in the contemporary language to reveal how social, syntactic, and pragmatic factors interacted in the creation of the modern edh initial pragmeme.