Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T17:43:08.721Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Measuring the success of prescriptivism: quantitative grammaticography, corpus linguistics and the progressive passive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2014

LIESELOTTE ANDERWALD
LIESELOTTE ANDERWALD*
Affiliation:
Englisches Seminar, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Leibnizstr. 10, 24118 Kiel, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article connects the quantitative study of grammaticography with a more traditional corpus-linguistic investigation of the progressive passive. Based on a careful analysis of over 250 grammars of English published during the nineteenth century in Britain and the US, I will try to answer the question whether prescriptivism has had any influence on purported differences between British and American English in the rise of the progressive passive. This article will argue that text-type sensitivity is the overriding factor determining the occurrence of the progressive passive in the nineteenth century, rather than national differences between British and American English. Prescriptive comments during the nineteenth century did not influence developments in American English significantly. However, during the 1950s modern-style prescriptivism can be shown to have massive effects on American newspaper language. Combining quantitative historical grammaticography and corpus-linguistic studies can thus extend our insights into the factors that influence language change.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2012. Clumsy, awkward or having a peculiar propriety? Prescriptive judgements and language change in the 19th century. Language Sciences 34, 28–53.Google Scholar
Anderwald, Lieselotte. Forthcoming. Pained the eye and stunned the ear: Language ideology and the progressive passive in the nineteenth century. In Schreier, Daniel, Timofeeva, Olga, Gardner, Anne, Honkapoja, Alpo & Pfenninger, Simone (eds.), Contact, variation and change in the history of English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Arnaud, René. 1983. On the progress of the progressive in the private correspondence of famous British people (1800–1880). In Jacobson, Sven (ed.), Papers from the Second Scandinavian Symposium on Syntactic Variation, Stockholm, May 15–16, 1982, 83–94. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Arnaud, René. 1998. The development of the progressive in 19th century English: A quantitative survey. Language Variation and Change 10, 123–52.Google Scholar
Aston, Guy & Burnard, Lou. 1998. The BNC handbook: Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Auer, Anita & González-Díaz, Victorina. 2005. Eighteenth-century prescriptivism in English: A re-evaluation of its effects on actual language usage. Multilingua 24, 317–41.Google Scholar
Bailey, Richard. 1996. Nineteenth-century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan. 1999. English pronunciation in the eighteenth century: Thomas Spence's ‘Grand Repository of the English Language’. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Finegan, Edward & Atkinson, David. 1994. ARCHER and its challenges: Compiling and exploring A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. In Fries, Udo, Tottie, Gunnel & Schneider, Peter (eds.), Creating and using English language corpora, 1–14. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Booth, David. 1837. The principles of English grammar. London: Charles Knight and Co.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. & Arnovick, Leslie K.. 2011. The English language: A linguistic history. 2nd revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chapman, Don. 2012. Enforcing or effacing useful distinctions?: Infer vs imply. Paper presented at ICEHL 17, August 2012, Zurich, Switzerland.Google Scholar
Conboy, Martin. 2006. Tabloid Britain: Constructing a community through language. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Conboy, Martin. 2007. The language of the news. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2010–. The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810–2009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2012. The 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009). In Hegedűs, Irén & Fodor, Alexandra (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2010, 219–49. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Denison, David. 1998. Syntax. In Romaine, Suzanne (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. IV: 1776–1997, 92–329. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:Google Scholar
DNB. 1953. The concise dictionary of national biography, part 1: From the beginnings to 1900: Being an epitome of the main work and its supplement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Downes, Lawrence. 2008. In a changing world of news, an elegy for copy editors. New York Times, 6 June.Google Scholar
Fennell, Barbara A. 2001. A history of English: A sociolinguistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Fens-de Zeeuw, Lyda. 2011. Lindley Murray (1745–1826), Quaker and grammarian. Utrecht: LOT Publications.Google Scholar
Gloy, Klaus. 2004. Norm. In Ammon, Ulrich, Dittmar, Norbert, Mattheier, Klaus J. & Trudgill, Peter (eds.), Sociolinguistics. 2nd edition, 392–8. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 1998. An annotated bibliography of 19th-century grammars of English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 2001. What corpora can tell us about the grammaticalisation of voice in get-constructions. Studies in Language 25, 49–88.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 2004. The passival and the progressive passive: A case study of layering in the English aspect and voice systems. In Lindquist, Hans & Mair, Christian (eds.), Corpus approaches to grammaticalization in English, 79–120. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, Lewis. 1976. The New York Times manual of style and usage: A desk book of guidelines for writers and editors. New York: Times Books.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. 1992. Social stylistics: Syntactic variation in British newspapers. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja. 1997. Be /Have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intransitives from Late Middle to Modern English. In Rissanen, Matti, Kytö, Merja & Heikkonen, Kirsi (eds.), English in transition: Corpus-based studies in linguistic variation and genre styles, 16–85. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja & Romaine, Suzanne. 2000. Adjective comparison and standardisation processes in American and British English from 1620 to the present. In Wright, Laura (ed.), The development of Standard English: 1300–1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts, 171–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja & Romaine, Suzanne. 2006. Adjective comparison in nineteenth-century English. In Kytö, Merja, Rydén, Mats & Smitterberg, Erik (eds.), Nineteenth-century English: Stability and change, 194–214. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja, Rydén, Mats & Smitterberg, Erik. 2006. Introduction: Exploring nineteenth-century English – past and present perspectives. In Kytö, Merja, Rydén, Mats & Smitterberg, Erik (eds.), Nineteenth-century English: Stability and change, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey & Smith, Nicholas. 2006. Recent grammatical change in written English 1961–1992. In Renouf, Antoinette & Kehoe, Andrew (eds.), The changing face of corpus linguistics, 185–204. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in contemporary English: A grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leitner, Gerhard (ed.) 1986. The English reference grammar: Language and linguistics, writers and readers. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Leitner, Gerhard (ed.) 1991. English traditional grammars: An international perspective. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Michael, Ian. 1997. The hyperactive production of English grammars in the nineteenth century: A speculative bibliography. Publishing History 41, 23–61.Google Scholar
Millar, Sharon. 1998. Language prescription: A success in failure's clothing? In Hogg, Richard M. & van Bergen, Linda (eds.), Historical Linguistics 1995: Selected papers from the 12th International Conference of Historical Linguistics, Manchester, August 1995, vol. 2: Germanic linguistics, 177–88. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Mondorf, Britta. 2009. More support for more-support: The role of processing constraints on the choice between synthetic and analytic comparative forms. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Mugglestone, Lynda. 2006. English in the nineteenth century. In Mugglestone, Lynda (ed.), The Oxford history of English, 274–304. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Navest, Karlijn. 2011. John Ash and the rise of children's grammar. Utrecht: LOT Publications.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, William R. & Todd, Loreto. 1991. Variety in contemporary English. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. [First published 1980]Google Scholar
Pratt, Lynda & Denison, David. 2000. The language of the Southey–Coleridge circle. Language Sciences 22, 401–22.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2009. 50 years of stupid grammar advice. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 April.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2010. The land of the free and The elements of style. English Today 26, 34–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2006. The role of functional constraints in the evolution of the English complementation system. In Dalton-Puffer, Christine, Kastovsky, Dieter, Ritt, Nikolaus & Schendl, Herbert (eds.), Syntax, style and grammatical norms: English from 1500–2000, 143–66. Bern etc.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 2011. Changes in complementation in British and American English. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Rydén, Mats. 1991. The be /have variation with intransitives in its crucial phases. In Kastovsky, Dieter (ed.), Historical English syntax, 343–54. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Rydén, Mats & Brorström, Sverker. 1987. The be/have variation with intransitives in English: With special reference to the late modern period. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Seoane, Elena. 2006. The decay of passives in scientific British and American English: Is scientific discourse becoming more personal? In Breivik, Leiv Egil, Halverson, Sandra & Haugland, Kari E. (eds.), ‘These things write I unto thee’: Essays in honour of Bjørg Bækken, 241–54. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas & Rayson, Paul. 2007. Recent change and variation in the British English use of the progressive passive. ICAME Journal 31, 129–59.Google Scholar
Smitterberg, Erik. 2005. The progressive in 19th-century English: A process of integration. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Straaijer, Robin. 2011. Joseph Priestley, grammarian: Late Modern English normativism and usage in a sociohistorical context. Utrecht: LOT Publications.Google Scholar
Strunk, William & White, E. B.. 1959. The elements of style. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Sundby, Bertil, Bjørge, Anne K. & Haugland, Kari E.. 1991. A dictionary of English normative grammar, 1700–1800. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2011. The great regression: Genitive variability in Late Modern English news texts. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2012. That, which, zero: prescriptivist influences on English relativizer usage. Paper presented at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany, 9 May.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (ed.). 2008. Grammars, grammarians and grammar-writing in 18th century England. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2011. The bishop's grammar: Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Visser, Frederikus Th. 1973. An historical syntax of the English language, vol. III, 2. Syntactical units with two and with more verbs. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Vosberg, Uwe. 2003. The role of extractions and horror aequi in the evolution of -ing-complements in Modern English. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Mondorf, Britta (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 305–27. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yonge, Charles Duke. 1879. A short English grammar for the use of schools. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.Google Scholar