About the project

This project seeks to trace different aspects of the process of linguistic influence: between individuals, within social networks, from grammars and grammarians on other grammars as well as on speakers and writers of English. In doing so it focuses on the final stages of the standardisation process, codification and prescription. Where did the eighteenth-century codifiers find the linguistic norm they advocated in their grammars? How did their own language compare with the norms of correctness they formulated? What was the effect of normative writing on actual usage? These questions will be addressed with the help of the research model of Social Network Analysis, adapted for the analysis of the full sociolinguistic competence of people living in the past. The approach taken in this project differs substantially and significantly from current work in historical sociolinguistics by focusing on the language of individuals - private documents, published and unpublished - in the context of the social networks to which they belonged rather than on representative samplings from speech communities. In doing so, it treats even the codifiers themselves as sociolinguistic informants. Their grammars are looked at in the context in which they were produced and in which they exercised their influence, on language users as well as on other grammars. In this the grammars will be considered as having similar roles as individuals within social networks (linguistic innovators, early adopters, followers). An important result of the project will be that the eighteenth-century normative grammarians are put back on the linguistic agenda, with the aim of creating a better understanding among linguists of normative grammar as such and prescriptive grammarians, their methods and motivations, in particular. It will, consequently, show that modern English usage, stigmatised when deviating from the currently accepted norm of correctness, has a continuous history of middle-class respectability.