Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-Writing in Eighteenth-Century England

This volume of essays on 18th-century English grammars and grammar-writers wrests 18th-century prescriptivism from its customary place in the treatment of the complaint tradition in textbooks of the history of the English language and thrusts it into the world of commerce, of book-sellers and hack writers, of periodical readers and critics, and of schools and the education of women. The volume is the outcome of an international workshop held under the auspices of Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s landmark research project on ‘The Codifiers and the English Language: Tracing the norms of Standard English’ at the University of Leiden.1 The collection of essays might be read in the context of the changing debate about the history of the standardization of the English language in the 18th century. Indeed, Tieken’s introduction situates the essays and their topics firmly in the context of the processes held to characterize standardization, not least the processes of codification (“the laying down of the ‘laws’ of the language” [p. 1]) and of prescription (“when normative rules of language came to be ‘imposed’ ” [ibid.]). One of the facts that underpins and motivates the study of the range and variety of grammars produced in the 18th century is the dramatic rise in the production of grammars in the second half of the 18th century, a fact that Tieken connects to the absence of an academy for regulating the use of English in public discourse. The key question that the contributors seem to have in mind as they examine different aspects of the grammar phenomenon in the period is the nature of the relationship between codification and prescription, both substantively and causally. Tieken argues that it is the desire for social advancement that prompts grammars to be used as manuals rather than as reference books, and this claim is examined variously as the contributors explore questions such as the following: Who were these grammarians? How can the grammars be defined and how did they relate to actual usage? How did grammarians respond to speakers’ desires for instruction? What was the business of grammar writing, and how does this relate to the intellectual endeavour of grammar writing

Art · Grammar · Linguistics · Literature · Rule-based machine translation · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy