This volume includes fifteen papers focussing on three important aspects of the history of English in Britain and overseas since the eighteenth century: the grammatical tradition of prescriptivism, syntactic developments and sociolinguistic factors affecting language variation. Within these areas, methodological approaches include those relating to corpus linguistics, social network theory, the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, and lexicography. The individual sections are highly cohesive with each other, as the ideological considerations on which the prescriptive tradition was founded are underpinned by sociological factors. Theoretical contributions appear alongside 'case studies' in which instances of specific usage are investigated.
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978-3-906770-97-0 (9783906770970)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
The Editors: Marina Dossena is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. Her published and current research focuses on English historical dialectology («Like runes upon a standin' stane»: The Perception of Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary: forthcoming 2003). She is currently compiling a corpus of 19th-century Scottish correspondence.
Charles Jones is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Recent publications include A Language Suppressed (1995), an edition of A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, by Sylvester Douglas (1779) (1992) and The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (1997).
Contents: Richard W. Bailey: The Ideology of English in the Long Eighteenth Century - Carol Percy: The Art of Grammar in the Age of Sensibility: The Accidence [...] for [...] Young Ladies (1775) - Joan C. Beal: John Walker: Prescriptivist or Linguistic Innovator? - Lynda Mugglestone: Proof and Process: The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary - Maurizio Gotti: Central Modal Verbs in Three 18th-Century English Grammars - Ilse Wischer: The Treatment of Aspect Distinctions in 18th- and 19th-Century Grammars of English - Rafal Molencki: Proscriptive Prescriptivists: On the Loss of the 'Pleonastic' Perfect Infinitive in Counterfactual Constructions in Late Modern English - Uwe Vosberg: Cognitive Complexity and the Establishment of -ing Constructions with Retrospective Verbs in Modern English - Elena Seoane Posse: The Codification of Indefinite Agents in Early and Late Modern English - Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: Lowth's Language - Tony Fairman: Letters of the English Labouring Classes and the English Language, 1800-34 - Marina Dossena: Modality and Argumentative Discourse in the Darien Pamphlets - Robert McColl Millar: 'Blind attachment to inveterate custom'. Language Use, Language Attitude and the Rhetoric of Improvement in the first Statistical Account - Agnieszka Kielkiewicz-Janowiak: Language and Society in the Diaries of Two Women in Early New England - Raymond Hickey: How and Why Supraregional Varieties Arise.
