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Copyright
Contents
Figures
Maps
Tables
Contributors
Preface
1 Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English
1 Introduction
1.1 Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century
1.2 The English language in the eighteenth century
2 Books on the English language
2.1 Religious background
2.2 Explaining ‘hard words’
2.3 The divergence of sound and spelling
2.4 An educational dilemma
2.4.1 Target groups for educational works
2.5 The question of class
2.6 Grammars for the nation
2.7 Training for public speaking
2.8 What is publicly acceptable?
2.9 Appropriation or plagiarism
3 Variation in language
4 Linguistic insecurity: intention or side-effect?
5 Disputed grammatical features
6 Conclusion
2 Prescriptivism and the suppression of variation
1 Towards a standard of pronunciation
2 Codification of a ‘good’ pronunciation, 1750–1800
2.1 .A change in attitude: the ‘snob value of a good pronunciation’
2.2 ‘An uniformity of pronunciation’: the suppression of national and regional variation
2.3 ‘Fixing’ the language
3 The legacy of the eighteenth century
3 Women’s grammars
1 Introduction
2 Marketing vernacular culture: ‘ladies’ and the Bellum Grammaticale of 1710–1712
3 Women’s participation in print culture: Fisher’s New Grammar (1745)
4 Education and social mobility: Devis’s .Accidence … for Young Ladies. (.1775.)
5 The cultural authority of natural roles: Lady Fenn’s grammars for mothers
6 Economic agency for the educated? Teacher-grammarians of the 1790s
7 Education and enlightenment: empowering women writers
8 Conclusion
4 Eighteenth-century women and their norms of correctness
1 Introduction
2 Models of correctness
3 Edward Synge’s letters to his daughter Alicia
4 Conclusion
5 Lowth as an icon of prescriptivism
1 Introduction
2 The origin of Lowth’s grammar
3 Three prescriptive strictures
3.1 Lowth and the disappearance of double negation
3.2 Preposition stranding
3.3 The split infinitive
4 The reception of Lowth’s grammar
5 Conclusion
6 Queeney Thrale and the teaching of English grammar
1 Introduction
2 Hester Lynch Thrale: a confident grammar teacher
3 The teaching of English grammar
3.1 Johnson’s Dictionary
3.2 Lowth’s grammar
3.3 Ash’s grammar
3.4 Newbery’s grammar
4 A pioneer in teaching grammar to children
5 The effectiveness of Thrale’s grammar lessons
6 Conclusion
7 Coalitions, networks, and discourse communities in Augustan England: The Spectator and the early eighteenth century essay
1 Introduction
2 Discourse communities and the early eighteenth-century essay writers
3 Social networks analysis and the Spectator coalition
4 Keyness and the Spectator agenda
4.1 Keyness: corpus linguistics methodology
4.2 Positive keywords
4.3 Negative keywords: the essays discourse community
5 Keyness, coalitions and the essay discourse community
8 Contextualising eighteenth-century politeness: social distinction and metaphorical levelling
1 Introduction
2 The historical background of eighteenth-century politeness
2.1 The lexical roots of politeness
2.2 Cultural histories of politeness
3 Contextual approaches to eighteenth-century politeness
3.1 Research questions
3.2 The correspondence corpus
4 Civil(ity) and polite(ness) in their lexical contexts
5 Civil(ity) and polite(ness) in their social contexts
5.1 Users of civility and politeness
5.2 The social spheres of civility and politeness
6 Metaphor and metonymy in politeness
6.1 Targets and sources
6.2 From concrete to abstract?
6.3 Singulars and plurals
7 Objects, substances and exchanges of eighteenth-century politeness
7.1 Entities of politeness
7.2 Instruments
7.3 More on civil and polite language
8 Variation in entity metaphors
9 Broadening the contexts of politeness
9.1 The Historical Thesaurus of English
9.2 A comparison with respect
10 Conclusions
9 Expressive speech acts and politeness in eighteenth-century English
1 Background to eighteenth-century speech acts and politeness
2 Politeness theory and eighteenth-century politeness ideology
3 Forms of address as an indication of politeness
4 Inherently polite speech acts: compliments and thanks
4.1 Compliments
4.1.1 Handbooks
4.1.2 Compliments in newspapers
4.1.3 Compliments in novels
4.2 Thanks
4.2.1 Thanks in handbooks
4.2.2 Thanks in newspapers: ZEN
4.2.3 Thanks in novels
5 Conclusions
10 Variation and change in eighteenth-century English
1 Demographics and language change
2 New words from new worlds
3 The merger of distinctions
4 Regulating English
5 Class trumps rank
6 Individual variation
7 Fluid and not fixed
11 Variation in sentential complements in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English: a processing-based explanation
1 Introduction
2 The corpora
3 Hawkins’s performance-based theory of grammar
4 The development of English sentential complements: an overview
5 Gerundives and infinitives as sentential subjects
5.1 Variables controlling the spread of gerundives to preverbal position
6 Conclusions: back to Hawkins’s processing model
6.1 More on domain minimisation
12 Nationality and standardisation in eighteenth-century Scotland
13 English in eighteenth-century Ireland
1 Introduction
1.1 Background to the eighteenth century
2 Irish English in the eighteenth century
2.1 The tradition of linguistic caricature
2.2 Drama in the eighteenth century
2.3 Jonathan Swift and the English language
2.4 Linguistic antiquarianism: Forth and Bargy
2.4.1 Linguistic features of Forth and Bargy
3 The development of Ulster Scots
3.1 Attestations of Ulster Scots
3.2 Delimiting Ulster Scots
3.3 Grammar
3.4 Vocabulary
3.5 Ulster Scots in the United States
4 Thomas Sheridan, elocution and eighteenth-century prescriptivism
4.1 Elocution
4.2 Sheridan’s influence
4.3 Correcting the natives
4.4 Sheridan’s strictures and eighteenth-century Irish pronunciation
5 Conclusion
14 Changes and continuities in dialect grammar
1 English (dialects) in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
2 Studying non-standard morphosyntax in the history of English: major limitations
3 Alexander Ellis’s On Early English Pronunciation (1889)
4 Existing catalogues of Late Modern English dialect features
5 Selected features of LME dialect syntax – past and present contexts
5.1 ‘Traditional’ (conservative) features (?)
5.1.1 Non-standard agreement: focus on the Northern Subject Rule
5.1.2 Pronoun exchange
5.1.3 Relative clauses and relative pronouns/particles
5.2 ‘Modern’ – innovative – features (?)
5.2.1 Multiple negation and forms of isn’t
5.2.2 Pseudo-passives with stood/sat
6 Conclusion and outlook
15 ‘Be pleased to report expressly’: the development of a public style in Late Modern English business and official correspondence
1 Introduction: issues in method and terminology
2 (Self-)representation, stance and evaluation in ‘public-style’ texts
2.1 Opinion and point of view in ‘public-style’ texts
3 Concluding remarks
16 Registering the language – dictionaries, diction and the art of elocution
1 The eighteenth-century context
2 Redefining the dictionary
3 The dictionary and the lexicon
4 The dictionary as interpreter
5 Decorum
6 Dictionaries and the proper speaker
7 The ends of lexicography
References
Late modern English language studies
Author Index
Index