Wtite a note on beginning and problems prescriptive grammar in the 18th century?
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Answer:
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Explanation:
1. Introduction
This chapter deals with the dramatic increase in the number of publications
on English grammar in the second half of the 18th century in England.
These texts have been discussed in connection with the process of language standardization since they propagate a normative, prescriptive view
of language (cf., e.g., Milroy and Milroy 1991). The questions I will focus
on are the following:
– Why is there an increase in the number of grammars of the English language from the middle of the 18th century onwards? and
– How are these texts to be understood in their socio-historical context?
One can of course ask ‘why should we care about prescriptive grammars?’,
‘why should we study them’ or ‘why should we ask the questions previously raised’? The answers to these questions are, of course, positive ones
in that it makes a great deal of sense to study this era and these texts for the
following reasons: (1) If we are dealing with sociolinguistics, we first of all
have to study language in its context, and investigate the factors that might
have influenced the creation of such texts. The social history of the time
has to be taken into account: We profit from knowledge about the school
situation, about the literary texts of the time, about earlier grammars, about
the printing situation, etc. in order to develop an understanding of the
meaning of the texts. I intend to point out a number of such socio-historical
factors in this chapter. (2) The grammars of the 18th century are important
with respect to many of the ideological ideas on language, that are still
present in today’s discourse, and the process of language standardization,
which, of course, did not end in the 18th century. Finally, (3) to understand
today’s ongoing language processes better, it is important to embed our
investigations in historical studies. Some have called this field ‘historical sociolinguistics’ others have named it ‘socio-historical linguistics’, as reflected in the title of the online journal edited by Tieken-Boon van Ostade
in the Netherlands, that actually combines the two terms. I believe that we
can gain much from such investigations, no matter what term we use.
This chapter is organized as follows: In section 2, I will give a brief historical sketch to contextualize the situation before the 18th century. In Section 3, I will describe the increase in the number of grammars of the English language in the 18th century in more detail and in Section 4 I will point
to some characteristics of such grammars in order to demonstrate how
these texts were constructed. Then I will proceed to answer the question
‘Why in the 18th century?’ and will illustrate my findings with examples
from the grammars (Section 5). To conclude I will offer an analysis of a
grammar from 1784 by a lesser known grammarian called John Fell, because he displays a surprisingly modern attitude to the study of the English
language that might be unexpected for a prescriptive grammarian .