The apostrophe was introduced into the English orthographic system by the mid sixteenth century as a printer's mark especially designed ‘for the eye rather than for the ear’ (Sklar 1976: 175; Little 1986: 15). Whereas the uses of the apostrophe today are limited to the Saxon genitive construction (the woman's book), to verbal contractions (you'll ‘you will’ or you're ‘you are’) and to other formulaic expressions (o'clock), its early uses also included other cases of elision and some abbreviated words (Parkes 1992: 55‒6; Beal 2010a: 58). Among this plethora of uses, perhaps one of the most distinctive functions of this symbol is the indication of the genitive construction, which has no full form in Present-day English after the progressive extinction of the genitive case affix. Such a development could have also happened in the regular past morpheme, but its outcome differed, as it continues to be spelled out today. The present article is then concerned with the standardisation of the apostrophe in the English orthographic system in the period 1600–1900 and pursues the following objectives: (a) to study the use and omission of the apostrophe in the expression of the past tense, the genitive case and the nominative plural in the period; (b) to assess the relationship between the three uses and their likely connections; and (c) to evaluate the likely participation of grammarians in the adoption and the rejection of each of these phenomena in English. The source of evidence for this corpus-based study comes from A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER 3.2, Denison & Yáñez-Bouza 2013), sampling language use in different genres and text types in the historical period 1700–1900. Additionally, the Early English Books Online corpus (EEBO, Davies 2017) has also been used as material to investigate the early uses of the possessive apostrophe in the late sixteenth century. A preliminary data analysis confirms the second half of the seventeenth century as the period that saw the definite rise of the genitive apostrophe in English, refuting the early assumptions which considered it to be an eighteenth-century development (Crystal 1995: 68; Lukač 2014: 3). The results also suggest that this phenomenon was to some extent associated with the decline of the apostrophe in other environments, more particularly in the expression of the regular past tense forms. Moreover, there seems to be no indication that standardisation emerged from linguistic prescription; instead, grammars seem to have been shaped after use.

中文翻译：

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“前一天晚上请求女王和他兄弟的赦免”：英语史上的撇号

撇号在 16 世纪中叶被引入英语拼写系统，作为专门“为眼睛而不是耳朵”设计的印刷标记（Sklar 1976：175；Little 1986：15）。然而今天撇号的使用仅限于撒克逊属格结构（女人的书），到言语收缩（你会‘你会’或你是'你是'）和其他公式化表达（点钟），其早期使用还包括其他省略情况和一些缩写词（Parkes 1992：55-6；Beal 2010a：58）。在众多的用途中，这个符号最独特的功能之一也许是指示所有格结构，在所有格词缀逐渐消失之后，该符号在当今英语中没有完整的形式。这种发展也可能发生在常规过去语素中，但其结果有所不同，正如今天继续阐明的那样。然后，本文关注 1600-1900 年期间英语拼字系统中撇号的标准化，并追求以下目标：（a）研究撇号在过去时、现在时的表达中的使用和省略。期间的所有格和主格复数；(b) 评估三种用途之间的关系及其可能的联系；(c) 评估语法学家可能参与英语中这些现象的采用和拒绝。这项基于语料库的研究的证据来源来自历史英语名录的代表性语料库（ARCHER 3.2，Denison & Yáñez-Bouza 2013），对 1700-1900 年历史时期不同流派和文本类型的语言使用进行采样。此外，早期英语在线书籍语料库（EEBO，Davies 2017）也被用作研究所有格撇号在十六世纪末的早期使用的材料。初步数据分析证实，十七世纪下半叶是英语中属格撇号明确兴起的时期，驳斥了认为这是十八世纪发展的早期假设（Crystal 1995：68；Lukač 2014： 3）。研究结果还表明，这种现象在某种程度上与撇号在其他环境中的衰落有关，尤其是在规则过去时形式的表达中。此外，似乎没有迹象表明标准化是从语言规定中产生的。相反，语法似乎是在使用后形成的。