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Language Between Description and Prescription
OXFORD STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
General Editor
Terttu Nevalainen, University of Helsinki

Editorial Board
Laurel Brinton, University of British Columbia
Donka Minkova, UCLA
Thomas Kohnen, University of Cologne
Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, University of Leiden

The Early English Impersonal Construction

Ruth Möhlig-​Falke

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English

Edited by Anneli Meurman-​Solin, María José López-​Couso, and Bettelou Los

Spreading Patterns
Hendrik De Smet

Constructions and Environments

Peter Petré

Middle English Verbs of Emotion and Impersonal Constructions

Ayumi Miura

Language Between Description and Prescription

Lieselotte Anderwald
Language Between
Description and Prescription
Verbs and Verb Categories in Nineteenth-​
Century Grammars of English

Lieselot te Anderwald

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2016

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address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Anderwald, Lieselotte, 1969– author.
Title: Language between description and prescription : verbs and verb categories
in nineteenth-century grammars of English / Lieselotte Anderwald.
Description: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2016] |
Series: Oxford studies in the history of English |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035655 | ISBN 9780190270674 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190270681 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190270698 (online content)
Subjects: LCSH: English language—19th century—Tense. |
English language—19th century—Verb. | English language—19th century—Grammar. |
English language—19th century—Standardization.
Classification: LCC PE1085 .A67 2016 | DDC 425/.609034—dc23 LC record
available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035655

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
 To Lucian
and the kids
CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1
1.1 First remarks 1
1.2 Previous research 2
1.2.1 The nineteenth century—​still a gap 2
1.2.2 Eighteenth-​century grammar writing:
Bio-​bibliographic studies 3
1.2.3 Studies of prescriptions/​proscriptions 5
1.2.4 Correlating grammarians’ views with
language change 6
1.2.5 After 1800 8

1.3 This book 9

1.3.1 Grammaticography and normativity 9
1.3.2 The grammars: The CNG 10
1.3.3 Corpora employed 15
1.3.4 Background assumptions 18
1.3.5 Terminology used 19

1.4 Structure of the book 20

CHAPTER 2 Defining the verb: Form, meaning, and syntax 24
2.1 Introduction 24
2.2 Defining verbs 24
2.3 Subdividing verbs: From active—​passive—​neuter to
transitive—​intransitive 26
2.4 The form of verbs: Regular vs. irregular 37
2.4.1 The historical evolution of terminology 37
2.4.2 Defining regular, defining weak 38
 2.5 The tenses of English 42
2.5.1 Defining tense 42
2.5.2 The status of the will-​future 46
2.5.3 Other future constructions 50
2.5.4 The status of the perfect 53

2.6 Summary and discussion 60

CHAPTER 3  Variable past tense forms I: Strong verbs
old and new 62
3.1 Introduction 62
3.2 u/​a-​verbs 63
3.2.1 History of u/​a-​verbs 63
3.2.2 Corpus data 64
3.2.3 The SING and SLING classes in eighteenth-​century
grammar writing 68
3.2.4 The SING class in the CNG 70
3.2.5 shrink in the CNG 75
3.2.6 The SLING class in the CNG 78
3.2.7 Qualitative comments in the CNG 80

3.3 Strong vs. weak verbs 84

3.3.1 Regularization and irregularization 84
3.3.2 Corpus data 85
3.3.3 thrive, dive, sneak, and drag in
eighteenth-​century grammar writing 88
3.3.4 thrive in the CNG 89
3.3.5 dive in the CNG 93

3.4 Summary and discussion 94

CHAPTER 4 Variable past tense forms II: Irregular weak verbs 97
4.1 Introduction 97
4.2 Weak verbs with vowel change: The DREAM class 98
4.2.1 History and previous studies 98
4.2.2 Corpus data 105
4.2.3 The DREAM class in eighteenth-​century
grammar writing 108
4.2.4 kneel in the CNG 109
4.2.5 dream in the CNG 110
4.2.6 lean in the CNG 111
4.2.7 leap in the CNG 112

| Contents
viii  
 4.2.8 plead in the CNG 114
4.2.9 Interim summary 117

4.3 Irregular weak verbs without vowel change:

The BURN class 119
4.3.1 History and previous studies 119
4.3.2 Corpus data 121
4.3.3 The BURN class in eighteenth-​century
grammar writing 123
4.3.4 dwell in the CNG 124
4.3.5 spill in the CNG 126
4.3.6 burn in the CNG 127

4.4 Summary and discussion 128

CHAPTER 5 The be-​perfect: A grammatical blind spot 131
5.1 Introduction 131
5.2 History and previous studies 132
5.3 Corpus data 133
5.4 The be-​perfect in eighteenth-​century
grammar writing 135
5.5 The be-​perfect in the CNG 138
5.5.1 Overview 138
5.5.2 The be-​perfect as a passive 141
5.5.3 The be-​perfect as a stative construction 146
5.5.4 Evaluating the be-​perfect 151

5.6 Summary and discussion 154

CHAPTER 6  ‘Apeculiar beauty of our language’:
The progressive 156
6.1 Introduction 156
6.2 History and previous studies 157
6.3 Corpus data 160
6.4 The progressive in eighteenth-​century
grammar writing 163
6.4.1 Defining the progressive in eighteenth-​century
grammar writing 163
6.4.2 Evaluating the progressive in eighteenth-​century
grammar writing 164

6.5 The progressive in the CNG 166

Contents | ix
 6.5.1 Defining the progressiveâ•… 166
6.5.2 The progressive with stative verbs: I am loving,
you are loving, they are lovingâ•… 176
6.5.3 Evaluating the progressiveâ•… 182

6.6 Summary and discussionâ•… 187

CHAPTER 7 ╇ Two passive constructions╅ 189
7.1 Introductionâ•… 189
7.2 ‘An absurd and monstrous innovation’:
The progressive passiveâ•… 190
7.2.1 History and earlier studiesâ•… 190
7.2.2 Corpus dataâ•… 192
7.2.3 The passival in eighteenth-╉century
grammar writingâ•… 195
7.2.4 The progressive passive in the CNGâ•… 196
7.2.5 Evaluating the progressive passiveâ•… 203
7.2.6 The cultural values transportedâ•… 214
7.2.7 Interim summaryâ•… 216

7.3 ‘Unnecessary words and phrases’: The get-╉passiveâ•… 217

7.3.1 History and earlier studiesâ•… 217
7.3.2 Corpus dataâ•… 220
7.3.3 get-╉constructions in eighteenth-╉century
grammar writingâ•… 224
7.3.4 get-╉constructions in the CNG╅ 227
7.3.5 Prescriptive success?â•… 234

7.4 Summary and discussionâ•… 235

CHAPTER 8 ╇Summary╅ 237
8.1 Introductionâ•… 237
8.2 The prescriptivism of nineteenth-╉century
grammar writingâ•… 237
8.3 The success of prescriptivismâ•… 245
8.4 Underlying premises of prescriptivismâ•… 246
8.5 Cultural key termsâ•… 248
8.6 The hyperactive production of English grammars in
the nineteenth centuryâ•… 249

Appendix Tables of absolute figures relating to diagramsâ•… 251

Referencesâ•… 287
Indexâ•… 323

|â•… Contents
xâ•…â•›
Language Between Description and Prescription
 CHAPTER 1 Introduction

1.1 First remarks

This book sets out to give a comprehensive view of nineteenth-​century gram-

mar writing as it relates to verbal categories. Based on a collection of 258
British and American grammar books of the time, I investigate relevant defi-
nitions and the terminology used, but also evaluations of phenomena of the
language undergoing change at the time. In this way, this book draws both a
quantitative and a qualitative picture of English grammars and grammar writ-
ing, gives insights not only into the precursors of modern linguistic descrip-
tion, but also the peculiarly nineteenth-​century discourse on correctness,
propriety, and acceptable behaviour that permeated British and American
societies. Especially my quantitative approach, that is the diachronic inves-
tigation in small slices of decades and the correlation with (earlier and my
own) corpus-linguistic studies of phenomena undergoing change has rarely
been undertaken before by others, and therefore deserves some comment and
contextualization. I will argue that the nineteenth century in particular still
represents a gap in our knowledge of grammar writing, due to a persistent
perception of the nineteenth century as the century of prescriptivism; in addi-
tion, the few corpus-​linguistic studies that exist have treated the nineteenth
century rather cavalierly—​no doubt also due to a paucity of available materials.
Even though the strong version of a myth of stasis—​relating to a (perceived)
lack of language change at that time—​has been convincingly disproved, an
unquestioning assumption of the success of prescriptive influence still shines
through in many authors’ easy dismissal of unexpected developments in
language as ‘due to prescriptive grammars’. Instead of simply assuming pre-
scriptive influence ex ante, in this book I want to empirically investigate what
grammarians actually had to say, and relate this to linguistic features actually
undergoing change at the time, in order to either substantiate or correct the
picture we still have of nineteenth-​century grammar writing.
1.2 Previous research

1.2.1 The nineteenth century—​still a gap

In 1989, C. Jones could still lament the neglect of Late Modern English (roughly
taken to include the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although other divi-
sions can and have been proposed), and call it the Cinderella of English lin-
guistics.1 The received position that Jones bemoaned consisted of two parts:
for one, the nineteenth century was seen as a century of stasis in terms of
language change (and therefore not worth investigating), and secondly, it was
the century of prescriptivism; in fact, the perception of nineteenth-​century
prescriptivism was (and is) so strong that for a long time it could serve as a
plausible cause of the (mythical) stasis in language change. The first part of
this myth has been debunked over the past twenty years, largely due to care-
ful corpus-​linguistic work, based both on private collections of material and
corpora like ARCHER and CONCE (described in more detail later) once mate-
rials became available—​and some were explicitly constructed with the aim
of closing this gap in the historical corpus-​linguistic landscape. The second
part of the myth—​t he nineteenth century as the century of prescriptivism—​is
alive and well, however, and is still encountered as commonly as the ‘century
of stasis’ used to be. In this unquestioning acceptance, it clearly still has some
characteristics of a myth. For example, at any empirical linguistics confer-
ence, it is observable that unexpected developments in corpus-​linguistic stud-
ies in the nineteenth century are often attributed wholesale to ‘prescriptive
influence’, even if the authors have never looked at nineteenth-​century pre-
scriptive sources. (It has to be said that this attitude is not specific to English
linguistics—​a recent chance example I have come across is Höder (2011) on
developments in Scandinavian and Northern German varieties).
This rather cavalier attitude cannot be blamed on historical corpus lin-
guists, however, because even in grammaticographic circles, the nineteenth
century has not been the subject of much attention. This oversight seems to
be linked precisely to the perception of the nineteenth century as the cen-
tury when prescription was rampant, and only slowly turned into a more
descriptive attitude with the rise of synchronic and diachronic linguistics
(as described e.g. by Aarsleff 1967).
In Milroy and Milroy’s standardization model (Milroy and Milroy 1999),
the late seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries are of course
particularly interesting as the time when the English language was codified
(cf. the title of Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade’s research project, the Codifiers

1
On the other hand, so have semantics (Kempson 1977: 2), pragmatics (Rajagopalan 2009), his-
torical dialect syntax (McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin 1986: 32), historical lexicology (Fischer
1989; Díaz Vera 2002), the lexicon and lexicology more generally (Lipka 2002: 210), folk etymology
(Maiden 2008), word order, or the study of intonation (both in Bolinger 1986: 3)—​t he metaphor of
Cinderella is thus quite prolific, and seems to serve the purpose of justifying one’s own specialty
quite well.

| Language Between Description and Prescription

2  
and the English Language). The following stage of prescription, said to start
in the middle of the 1760s, has drawn much less attention, attesting to the
ongoing effectiveness of this myth. A thorough investigation of nineteenth-​
century grammar writing is still missing, and this area of investigation thus
still constitutes a gap (or: a Cinderella topic). In this book, I want to close this
gap, at least in part, for the phenomenon of verbal categories. In this respect,
my book is partly grammaticographic in outlook, and in many chapters and
subchapters I will try to answer the question, What did the grammars have to
say?, for example, on questions like What is a verb?, How are verbs formally
differentiated?, How many tenses does English have?, How is the progressive
defined?, etc.
In addition, however, my interest is in correlating language change quanti-
tatively with the grammar writing of the time. As the next section will argue,
even for the comparatively better-​studied eighteenth century, this has not
been done frequently, even though it is an approach that promises to produce
interesting results.

1.2.2 Eighteenth-​century grammar writing:

Bio-​bibliographic studies
The scholarly interest in grammar writing has long been biographical, and
bibliographic; Auer has called these types of studies ‘micro-​studies’ of gram-
mar writing (Auer 2006). Rodríguez-​ Gil and Yáñez-​ Bouza, for example,
explicitly speak of the ‘bio-​bibliographic nature’ of their work on the ECEG
(Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars) database.2
Stemming from this research tradition, we now possess detailed stud-
ies of the life, career, unpublished letters, and yes, grammar writing, of the
prominent eighteenth-​century grammarians Robert Lowth, Lindley Murray,
or Joseph Priestley in what one can perhaps call the Leiden school of gram-
mar studies (e.g. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade 2011; and a number of dissertations,
e.g. Straaijer 2011; Navest 2011; Fens-​de Zeeuw 2011). Individual pronounce-
ments on individual grammatical features have also been studied for vari-
ous eighteenth-​century grammar writers (e.g. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade 1982,
1987, 1994, 2002a, 2008b, 2010b). One group of grammar writers who have
attracted their share of scholarly attention is the group of women grammar-
ians, such as Ellenor Fenn, Ann Fisher, or the pseudonymous Mrs Teachwell
(Percy 2006, 2010; Rodríguez-​ Gil 2006; Navest 2008; Tieken-​ Boon van
Ostade 2010a). The concentration on the eighteenth century can perhaps be
explained by the perception that this is the century where the most interesting
developments in the establishment of this new discipline were taking place,
and these eighteenth-​century studies provide us with a good picture of who
the first codifiers of the English language were, and what their motives were

2
E.g. http://​www.helsinki.fi/​varieng/​CoRD/​corpora/​ECEG/​background.html, more on which below.

In t roduc t ion | 3  

in writing grammar books or treatises (pecuniary, educational, emancipa-
tory, linguistic, etc.). Some of the interest in eighteenth-​century grammars is
linked to the relatively recent interest in the Late Modern English period fol-
lowing Jones’s lament, mentioned in the beginning; this has produced regular
conferences since 2002 (cf. contributions in Dossena and Jones 2003; Pérez-​
Guerra, et al. 2007; or Tieken-​Boon van Ostade and Wurff 2009; Tieken-​Boon
van Ostade 2008a), and textbooks on Late Modern English typically contain
overviews of the grammar writing of the period (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade
2009; Beal 2004; Görlach 1999, 2001; R. Bailey 1996). Grammar writing is of
particular interest in the context of studies on the standardization of English
(cf. e.g. the papers in Stein and Tieken-​Boon van Ostade 1994), and the peri-
ods (and issues) of codification and prescription (in the sense of Milroy and
Milroy 1999) have naturally engendered the most research activity. Recent
conferences on the issue of prescriptivism itself have led to the revision of
some earlier, rather crude assumptions concerning this topic (cf. the contri-
butions in Beal, Nocera, and Sturiale 2008; a special issue of Historiographia
Linguistica 33 (2006); and forthcoming publications; cf. also contributions in
Percy and Davidson 2012). Again, these studies mostly concentrate on the
time before the nineteenth century, and it is perhaps a little ironic that studies
which set out to rectify overgeneralized, simplified claims with regard to the
eighteenth century have themselves dismissed, rather than studied in detail,
the nineteenth century.
Apart from individual studies, Ian Michael’s (1970) work English
Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800 was (and still is) the only
book-​length treatment of the subject that traces the evolution of English gram-
mar writing and that is based on a sizeable collection of historical grammars;
as the full title of the monograph makes clear, Michael’s interest stops with
the year 1800. The study of historical English grammars was continued epi-
sodically over the last two decades of the twentieth century in Germany, on
the one hand, by Gerhard Leitner, who contributed some individual studies
and organized two symposiums on the subject (leading to the publication of
Leitner 1986c, 1991) and on the other hand, by Manfred Görlach, who, based
on Ian Michael’s work and adding library studies of his own, produced a bib-
liography of grammar writing that continued on from Michael’s seventeenth-​
and eighteenth-​century materials (published as Görlach 1998). Ian Michael
himself has extended parts of his work into the nineteenth century, with
two important bibliographic papers (Michael 1991, 1997), giving us a good
overview of what grammar publishing looked like in the nineteenth century.
Being bibliographic in nature, however, those articles give very little informa-
tion on the content of these grammars.
As another example of the bibliographic ‘take’ on grammar writing, the
impressive ECEG database (Rodríguez-​Gil and Yáñez-​Bouza 2009) contains
bio-​and bibliographic information on 323 eighteenth-​ century grammars
and their authors, with some indication of the table of contents, but does not
permit the study of what was prescribed, or proscribed against. Then again,

| Language Between Description and Prescription

4  
this is perhaps not necessary, because many of these grammars are avail-
able in Alston (1974), and most can today easily be accessed through ECCO
(Eighteenth-​Century Collections Online).3

1.2.3 Studies of prescriptions/​proscriptions
On the other hand, for the eighteenth century we also have some docu-
mentation of the evaluation of individual linguistic phenomena that goes
beyond individual studies. The most systematic collection is probably the
Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 1700-​1800 (DENG; Sundby et al.
1991). DENG is based on 187 grammars. It groups verdicts in these 187
eighteenth-​century normative grammars by type of criticism (was a con-
struction criticized as an ambiguity, for faulty concord, for (lack of) differ-
entiation, etc.?), and then by linguistic category (noun, verb, demonstrative
pronoun, indefinite pronoun, etc.). This is helpful for an overview of what
was criticized, as well as the gist of the criticism, and I will keep refer-
ring back to DENG for an overview of what eighteenth-​century grammar-
ians had to say, and to investigate how far nineteenth-​century grammar
writing continues the tradition of eighteenth-​century grammar writing.
However, using DENG to retrieve information on individual constructions
is quite cumbersome, because the reader has to know in advance in what
terms a construction may have been criticized (e.g. if one was interested
in potential criticism of the progressive, would one look under concord,
co-​o ccurrence, differentiation, or inflection?). In addition, the linguistic
phenomena criticized are arranged under low-​level morphological catego-
ries, as indicated above. This means that there is no heading ‘progressive’
or ‘passival’; instead, instances of criticism of the passival (the bridge is
building) are found in the chapter on ‘differentiation’ under the head entry
‘Ven:Ving’ [sc. past participle vs. present participle], and then ordered by
lexical verb criticized. Thus that section combines criticism of the passival
(‘the bread is baking’ s.v. baking, ‘the clothes are washing’ s.v. washing)
with criticism of the progressive (‘is, or has been, loving’, s.v. loving →
loved) and criticism of other individual constructions (e.g. ‘I am mistaken’,
s.v. mistaken → mistaking, as well as mistaking → mistaken, or ‘owing to’, s.v.
owing → owed/​o w(e)n).
Besides its cumbersome method, which means that criticism in unex-
pected places might easily be missed, a more problematic aspect is that it
is impossible to retrieve from the dictionary itself the actual terms that are
used by the grammarians: for the sake of manageability, all terms used are
grouped into higher-​order semantic clusters (Sundby et al. 1991: 38–​53).
Thus, impr stands for ‘improper’, but is also used for ‘very improper’, the
much stronger ‘glaring improprieties’ or ‘highly improper’, and the much

3
At http://​fi nd.galegroup.com/​ecco.

In t roduc t ion | 5  

weaker ‘not so proper as’ or ‘not strictly proper’. More problematically,
the diametrically opposed ‘very improperly omitted’ and ‘very improp-
erly employed’ are also both included under impr, as is ‘more proper than’
(Sundby et al. 1991: 48f.). The underlying principles for collecting terms,
although based on etymology as suggested by impr, seems to have been not
wholly etymological, as becomes clear if we take another example: inel (for
‘inelegant’) includes epithets that seem to come from quite distinct seman-
tic domains, such as ‘awkward’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘flatulent’, ‘insipid’, ‘less
graceful’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘tedious’, ‘not becoming’, ‘error against eloquence’,
‘feeble’, or ‘blemish’ (Sundby et al. 1991: 49). Without recourse to the origi-
nal texts, then (a work which would nonsensically duplicate Sundby et al.’s
work), a reconstruction of who said what over the course of the eighteenth
century on the basis of DENG is difficult, if not impossible. (Cf. also Tieken-​
Boon van Ostade 2011: 109, who says that this system ‘does not always do
justice to the grammarian in question’.)
Finally, perhaps the starkest disadvantage of DENG lies in the fact that
it is a dictionary of negative criticism (‘proscriptions’) only. As the authors
say in the preface, ‘DENG sets out to provide a detailed systematic accounts of
the forms … that did not find favour with eighteenth-​century English grammar-
ians’ (Sundby et al. 1991: 2; their italics). In other words, for the beginning
prescription/​proscription phase, potential positive terms of evaluation are not
included, and neither are those authors who may have noticed a construction,
but decided to report on it in neutral terms.
Nevertheless, this book will utilize DENG to some extent, with due reser-
vation. In my overviews of eighteenth-​century comments on the linguistic
phenomena I am interested in in the context of this book, I have combined
all information contained in DENG under the individual headings, and put
all figures culled from the lists of epithets into context, the context being the
number of grammars that was the basis of DENG (listed in their bibliogra-
phy, Sundby et al. 1991: 439–​53). In this way, DENG should provide us with
at least an impression of the treatment that features like the progressive, the
be-​perfect or the lexeme get received in the eighteenth century, which can
then serve as a foil to my more detailed analysis of nineteenth-​century gram-
mars, and indicate breaks or continuities in a tradition of normative grammar
writing.

1.2.4 Correlating grammarians’ views with

language change
Sometimes, in micro-​studies of grammar writing, pronouncements in gram-
mars are correlated with the language of the time, for example with the
author’s own language use. Again, studies in this vein have led to important
insights, such that Lowth seems to have been aware of the register sensitivity
of the phenomenon of preposition stranding, and even observed these distinc-
tions himself. Thus, Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2009: 87) claims that Lowth

| Language Between Description and Prescription

6  
not only allowed stranded prepositions in familiar contexts in his grammar,
but used this construction himself in personal letters.
However, correlations with wider corpus-​based studies are overall quite
rare. Even in 2012, McColl Millar still has to speculate with regard to mor-
phosyntactic variability that ‘it is likely that a correlation exists between the
increasing number of prescriptive grammars published during the period
… and the gradual diminution, particularly in formal written contexts, of
phenomena such as “minority” past-​tense and past-​participle usage and the
codification of the formal distinction between adverb and adjective, as well as
the complete conquest in writing of “double negatives” ’ (McColl Millar 2012:
85), without being able to cite reference studies. A (pre-​corpus-​linguistic) cor-
relation of linguistic phenomena and their treatment in grammars of the time
can be found in Visser’s Historical Syntax (Visser 1963–​73), which quite regu-
larly (though not on all phenomena) has sections including grammarians’
voices. Visser does not comment on this approach explicitly (beyond saying
very generally that his work relies on ‘a very extensive collection of documen-
tary material compiled over a period of more than thirty years’; Visser 1963: v),
but since all works he consulted are included in his more general list of refer-
ences, one can see that grammars make up the majority of consulted titles for
the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, amounting, in my
count, to over two hundred titles for the nineteenth century alone. However,
the inclusion of grammars is reduced to a few handfuls after the 1850s, after
which philological studies and early dialectological works dominate. One can
only speculate that for Visser, the middle of the nineteenth century perhaps
marked the end point of prescriptivism, the turning point towards a more
descriptive linguistics, or that more idiosyncratic reasons may have played a
role in the choice of this cut-​off point.
Be that as it may, Visser is a rare exception, and it is perhaps not surpris-
ing that when later scholars have included nineteenth-​century grammarians’
views on specific constructions in their discussion of a phenomenon, they
often do so on the basis of Visser’s quite extensive collection, and quotations
(e.g. Denison 1998; Hundt 2004a; Görlach 1999).
Also based on a pre-​electronic collection of sources, Dekeyser (1975) is a
rare case of a detailed correlation of grammarians’ judgements with actual
language use. Dekeyser investigated 60 grammars from the nineteenth cen-
tury, and compared results to a hand-​made ‘corpus’ of literary texts. In contrast
to my focus on the verb phrase, Dekeyser concentrates on concord phenomena
with problematic subjects (such as collective NPs, indefinites, NPs with mul-
tiple heads that are joined with and vs. or, postposed plural adjuncts, heads
of different numbers, or there with plural nouns) and on the feature of case
(e.g. in the subject of the gerund, the notorious question of who vs. whom, or
accusative pronouns in nominative ‘territory’). Also in contrast to my inves-
tigations, his approach is a ‘grammars-​first’ one: he collects comments on
these features because they were regularly treated in the grammars, and then
correlates them with actual language data, in this way determining whether

In t roduc t ion | 7  

prescriptions were heeded. By contrast, I will concentrate on features that
demonstrably undergo change in the language, and then scour the grammars
for comments (or, indeed, lack of them) on these features. While this reversal
of focus will also allow us to answer the question of whether prescriptions
were followed, it affords us the additional opportunity of noticing whether
some changes perhaps went unnoticed, or did not attract criticism.
Very similar to this ‘language-​first’ approach is Anita Auer’s more recent
‘macro-​study’ (her term) on the phenomenon of the subjunctive (Auer 2009).
Especially the revival of the mandative subjunctive (I insist that he be there) is
often laid at the door of prescriptive grammar writing, and Auer can show in
her correlation of data from ARCHER with her own compilation of a ‘precept’
corpus that there is indeed a slight halt in the decline of the subjunctive after
it started to be actively endorsed by normative grammarians. Although Auer
takes a wider temporal perspective, this is one of the few studies (besides
Dekeyser and Visser) that takes grammar writing of the nineteenth century
seriously, looks at the temporal development of prescriptive comments (albeit
in quite large subsections of 50-​year periods), and correlates grammars with
results from corpus studies. Essentially the same focus is also already pres-
ent in Rydén and Brorström’s (1987) study of the decline of the be-​perfect
(more on which in ­chapter 5), which they trace in another hand-​made ‘corpus’
of public and private writing, and correlate with comments in 50 grammars
for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One final study that deserves
mention here because of the attempt at establishing correlations is Pounder
(2001), who investigates changes in adverb marking in German vs. English
diachronically. However, her study of actual language change is again based
on a small manual selection of texts, and the number of grammars she looks
at is also quite limited (according to my count, she uses nine English gram-
mars from the nineteenth century, six from the eighteenth, and two from the
seventeenth).
Overall, then, it is still quite rare to find in-​depth studies both of language
change and of grammar writing which try to establish correlations between
the two fields. Much of this is due to a neglect of nineteenth-​century grammar
writing, as we will see in the next section.

1.2.5 After 1800
DENG stops at the year 1800, but it is not the only source that does so. The
year 1800 seems to have some magical quality about it, because it is the end
point of many collections; of course, those that concentrate on the eighteenth
century explicitly (e.g. ECCO, or the ECEG), but also Alston’s bibliography
(1965, A Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to
the Year 1800) and his 1974 text collection (English Linguistics 1500-​1800), the
early study of the ‘doctrine of correctness’ by Leonard (1929), the investiga-
tion of historical grammar writing in Michael (1970) mentioned earlier, or the
contributions on the standardization of the English language in the overviews

| Language Between Description and Prescription

8  
by Stein and Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (1994), or Wright (2000), to name just
a few. This concentration on the year 1800 as an end point when it comes to
grammars strongly suggests that grammar writing might have stopped after
the year 1800. Since I cannot see any valid reason why linguists should not
be interested in what happened after the year 1800, I will conclude that the
nineteenth century still constitutes a Cinderella gap, and is per se of scholarly
interest.
Apart from the general claim that much of nineteenth-​century grammar
writing is prescriptive, the little that is actually known of nineteenth-​century
grammar writing (apart from the temporally more extended studies in Visser
1963–​73; Dekeyser 1975; and Auer 2009) is again bibliographic. In Michael’s
article titles, the exasperation with the proliferation of published grammars
becomes apparent: he writes of ‘more than enough grammars’ (Michael
1991), or ‘the hyperactive production of grammars in the nineteenth century’
(Michael 1997), and these titles sum up the attitude that would colour much
subsequent work. Based partly on Michael, Görlach has produced a book-​
length Annotated Bibliography of 19th-​Century Grammars of English (Görlach
1998) where he lists 1936(!) different bibliographic titles. The mass of material
that is available—​at least bibliographically—​thus contrasts sharply with the
little scholarly interest it has hitherto kindled.
Of course, the lack of detailed studies may also have been caused by the
rather restricted availability of many works; even in 1998 Görlach could still
complain that a facsimile reprint of even the most important nineteenth-​
century grammars would be desirable, but impossible to finance (Görlach
1998: 10). Around that time, some linguists even published articles on books
they had never seen (Wächtler 1986). Even in 2003, Wischer could publish
a grammaticographic study on the treatment of aspect based on seventeen
grammars from the eighteenth century, but only eight from the nineteenth
(Wischer 2003). Luckily (for us), with the advent of the (in many respects,
of course, highly problematic) digitization project of Google Books since the
early 2000s, many rather obscure printed sources are now comparatively eas-
ily available, and practically beg to be explored in more depth.

1.3 This book

1.3.1 Grammaticography and normativity

From all that has been said above, it should now become clear where this
book will differ from earlier studies. My main interest is in correlating what
happened in language (restricted here to verbal categories) with what the
grammars had to say. My interest in the grammars extends both to their gram-
maticography (Which terminology was used, which definitions, and with
which examples? Which phenomena were explained in detail, and which only
rarely? What is the common core of nineteenth-​century grammar writing?)

In t roduc t ion | 9  

and their normativity (Which phenomena were criticized, and with which
arguments? Which phenomena were not criticized, and why not? Can the dis-
course on normativity be related to other phenomena in society at the time?),
but overall my focus lies on the grammars and the grammar writing of the
time, not so much on the biographies of their authors, or bibliographic details
of the grammars. This lack of individual depth is, I believe, more than made
up for by the breadth of coverage, because data from 258 grammars have been
included in the analyses. In addition, I have investigated many eighteenth-​
century sources to complement the picture, and to situate nineteenth-​century
grammar writing in its historical context. In this way, it will become possible
to say with some certainty what majority and minority positions were in terms
of grammar writing at different points in time, and to trace developments over
the course of the nineteenth century.

1.3.2 The grammars: The CNG

I have come to call my collection of nineteenth-​century grammar books just
that, the Collection of Nineteenth-​Century Grammars (CNG). The way it came
into existence is at least partly due to chance, but perhaps also a sign of our
times. I remember preparing a formal lecture on the nineteenth century in
March 2007. To illustrate some scathing comments on the progressive passive
that I was already aware of through other sources (more on which in ­chapter
7), I must have googled for some historical texts or quotations when I stum-
bled on the (then new) Google books project. I could hardly believe my luck
and very quickly found over 30 historical grammar books as full texts—​much
more than just the quotations I originally hoped for. The collection of com-
ments that resulted from this first forage was a huge success during that talk
and engendered a very lively discussion, and in fact became the basis of much
of my further work. From that time onwards, I regularly revisited the website,
and as Google Books grew, so did my collection of nineteenth-​century gram-
mar books, and as my collection grew, so did my interest in them. Going back
to Google Books more systematically over the course of the years 2009, 2010,
and up to May 2011, I searched for ‘English grammar’ in particular, restrict-
ing the years of publication to 1800 to 1910, and then manually post-​edited
the results. The latter date was extended by a decade from 1900, the end point
of my collection, to account for possible reprints or later editions. All texts
found were then downloaded as PDF files as long as they fulfilled the follow-
ing criteria: they were written for an (English language) home market (exclud-
ing grammars intended for foreign language learning) by native speakers of
English; they were not intended for very small children; their date of first
publication was between 1800 and 1900 (determined by a comparison with
the entries in Görlach 1998); and they were the earliest editions available (this
was cross-​checked and corrected by subsequent searches). In this way, the col-
lection grew from the initial 33 grammars in 2007 to 56 in 2009, to 206 at the
end of 2010, and to the final 258 in May 2011. Though occasional later checks

| Language Between Description and Prescription

10  
turned up one or two new grammars, this was nowhere near the dynamic
increases of 2009 or 2010, and overall my observation of developments in
Google Books confirmed that the main publications had been included by the
beginning of 2011. Comparison with the main publications on grammar writ-
ing in the nineteenth century confirmed that the most important grammars
were all contained in the CNG. May 2011 was therefore deemed acceptable as
the cut-​off point, in order to start on the actual analyses.
Grammars in the CNG mainly come from Britain and the United States.
There is one grammar from Canada; four are from Ireland; and nine were
published in Scotland exclusively, or mainly.4 In keeping with Görlach (1998),
the Canadian grammar is included with the figures from the United States;
grammars from Ireland and Scotland are counted with the British grammars.
As Görlach notes, ‘the majority of the books were … used in the country that
produced them’ (Görlach 1998: 7), and transatlantic imports will therefore be
neglected in this book. Some other grammars have several places as imprint;
some of these come from within one country (London and Birmingham,
London and Cheltenham), some span national boundaries (London and
Edinburgh, or London and Dublin); especially towards the end of the century,
a number of grammars were published in Britain and the United States simul-
taneously, or we have the American editions of a British work. In these cases,
the place mentioned first, or the country of the original edition was counted.
The only exception here is the British social reformer Cobbett, whose 1818
grammar was published in American exile. (The British version followed a
year later.) Because of his biographical background, Cobbett was classified
with the British grammar writers. Taking this into account, the overall num-
ber of British grammars is 133, and the number of American grammars is
125; in other words, both major regions are represented in the CNG to almost
the same degree. The individual grammars are distributed over individual
decades as illustrated in Fig. 1.1.
Figure 1.1 shows some interesting peaks. British grammars included in
the CNG (represented by the lighter bars) follow the known rise and fall in
the publication of grammar books quite closely (cf. Michael 1997). No pub-
lished figures for US grammars exist, but having collected all the entries from
Görlach (1998), I divided them into British vs. American sources, and ordered
them chronologically as to the dates of their first editions, cf. Fig. 1.2.
As Fig. 1.2 shows, the rise in the number of American grammars in the
CNG in the 1880s and 1890s actually mirrors a rise in published grammars
of the time (although the rise in the CNG is steeper, and American grammars

4
From Canada: Davies 1869. From Ireland: McArthur 1836; Sullivan 1855 [1843]; R. Harvey 1851;
Edwardes 1877. From Scotland: M’Intyre 1831; Connell 1843 [1831]; M’Culloch 1834; A. Burnet 1838;
Connon 1845; Macintosh 1852; Wood 1857; Collier 1866; Dalgleish 1867; Coghlan 1868. Even though
the number of Scottish grammars is higher than that of Canada or Ireland, an absolute number of
nine does not allow us yet to investigate whether Scottish grammar writing constitutes a separate
national tradition.

In t roduc t ion | 11  

 25

20

15

10

0
1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890

US Britain

Figure 1.1 Number of grammars per decade in the CNG.

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0
1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890

US Britain

Figure 1.2 Number of grammars in Görlach (1998).

at the very end of the century are in fact overrepresented). I would speculate
that we are dealing here with a skewing of the material that is caused by the
fact that towards the end of the nineteenth century, either published books
were collected more systematically, reflecting changes in storing and preserv-
ing historical books, or that simply more books survived from the end than
from the beginning of the century, in addition to the differences in actual
publication patterns just documented; in particular, the Google books project
predominantly scanned in books held by American libraries, which in combi-
nation might account for the higher number of American grammars included
in the CNG towards the end of the century.

| Language Between Description and Prescription

12  
 Despite these imbalances, I decided against discarding the materials
I already had (a difficult decision in any case), and all subsequent analyses on
the CNG will therefore be based on the full collection of 258 books.5 Whenever
I compare developments in British and American grammars, I will be partic-
ularly interested in majority and minority opinions, rather than actual num-
bers. For this reason, I will resort to comparing pronouncements in grammars
in terms of rough percentages per decade, in this way enabling readers to com-
pare British and American grammar writing despite differences in absolute
numbers.
In contrast to the interest in women grammarians of the eighteenth
century mentioned above, not much is known about their nineteenth-​
century equivalents. My collection suggests that grammar writing in the
nineteenth century was a peculiarly male domain. Only two British gram-
mars are by women, and, coming from the first half of the nineteenth
century, possibly stand in an eighteenth-​century tradition. In the material
from the United States, four grammars are written by women, and three
are co-​w ritten with women;6 these US grammars all come from the end
of the century and thus probably mirror the improved educational oppor-
tunities of women towards the turn of the twentieth century. Only six
grammars in the CNG are anonymous, and no probable author has been
reconstructed (based on the information in Görlach 1998). One anony-
mous grammar comes from the United States; five are from Britain.7 The
authors of another nine grammars are known by their initials only, in five
cases we lack information on one of two co-​authors,8 although judging
from the overall figures, chances are only slight that some of these would
have been written by women.
The rise of philology cannot be traced in this book, but see Aarsleff
(1967), Finegan (1998), or Leitner (1986a), who traces the start of philologi-
cally informed grammar writing to Bain (1863) and Mason (1858) (although
in partial ignorance of the sources, cf. Leitner 1986a: 412), probably follow-
ing Visser (1963–​ 73), who also mentions these two as pivotal. However,

5
All grammars contained in the CNG have been marked by an asterisk in the list of primary sources.
6
British women authors: Jane Marcet 1835; Harriet Smith 1848. US women authors: Mary Hyde
1895 [1888]; Harriet Mathews 1892; Irene Mead 1896; Mary W. George and Anna C. Murphy 1896.
Co-​authors: Marion Durand Mugan and John S. Collins 1890; William D. Whitney and Sara E. H.
Lockwood 1901 [1892]; George Lyman Kittredge and Sarah Louise Arnold 1900.
7
From the United States: English Grammar 1888. From Britain: The Schoolmaster at Home 1835; An
Abridgment of the Pupil Teacher’s English Grammar 1848; English Grammar and Composition 1853;
English Grammar for Elementary Schools 1877; Summary of English Grammar 1885.
8
Initials only from the United States: L. T. Covell 1855 [1852]; Z. M. Chandler 1862; C. C. Long
1890. From Britain: J. W. R. 1839; J. H. James 1847; E. D. Hill 1864; W. V. Yates 1884 [1873];
W. J. Dickinson 1878; and G. Steel 1894. Dickinson and Steel are explicitly referred to as ‘Mr.’ (in
a review of the grammar in the case of Steel (The Nation 60/​61 (1895): 29), in a committee report
in the case of Dickinson (1875: 245)). Initials only for co-​authors: from the United States: John
T. Spencer and S. A. Hayden 1866; Louis Lafayette Williams and Rogers 1889 [1888]; William
Malone Baskervill and J. W. Sewell 1895, and from Britain: Henry St. John Bullen and C. Heycock
1853; Louis Direy and A. Foggo 1858.

In t roduc t ion | 13  

according to Leitner, ‘the distinction between “school” and “scholarly” gram-
mars [a distinction proposed by Friend (1976)] is an oversimplification’ (Leitner
1986b: 1347) anyway, and will not be continued here. A purported distinction
between ‘school’ and ‘scholarly’ grammars is difficult to implement practi-
cally, and was therefore not used as a selectional criterion for the grammars in
the CNG. From the titles of many works and the prefaces, however, it becomes
clear that most grammars were indeed intended for teaching.
Of the 258 grammars, 173 are the first edition, for a further 62 grammars
an edition less than ten years after the first edition was included. Only 23
grammars (or under 10%) of the CNG are included in an edition that has
appeared 10 or more years after the first edition. Whenever these grammars
are discussed in the text, I will pay particular attention to this time difference.9
Most grammarians are included with only one of their works in the CNG.
Initially, I included several works where I could get access to them, following
the precedence of Sundby et al. (1991) or Görlach (1998). However, during the
initial analyses, it became clear very quickly that the degree of self-​plagiarism
was striking, and including different works (not to mention different editions)
by the same writer would have seriously distorted some of the results. The
shorter, less explicit work was therefore as a rule deleted from the CNG, and
most writers are now only represented by one grammar. Exceptions are Goold
Brown, Stephen W. Clark, Thomas W. Harvey, Richard Hiley, Robert Latham,
and Jonathan Rigdon, whose books complement each other rather than repeat
themselves, or differed in other significant respects from each other, as well as
William D. Whitney, where the 1901 edition (with co-​author Sara Lockwood)
constitutes an interesting case of a grammar being made more practical, but
also much more prescriptive.
There are good reasons not to regard the CNG as a corpus in any techni-
cal sense of the word (see also section 1.3.5). Although all books are available
as PDF files, the individual pages are saved as pictures, not texts. For even
rudimentary text searches, the 50,000 pages or so would have to be fed into a
text recognition programme and carefully proof-​read. Although this initially
seemed attractive, it soon became clear that text recognition would have been
very labour intensive, with only limited gains. Because terminology in many
cases was not unified, a searchable ‘grammars corpus’ would not have had
many benefits. A phenomenon like the be-​perfect, for example, was often
misidentified both terminologically (as a passive) and in terms of function
(as an attributive stative construction), and can therefore not be found easily
by searching for a certain set of terms, or looking under certain headings, or
by counting certain rules. Instead, the grammars have to be read carefully,
including notes and stray remarks, which might be spread over the introduc-
tion, the ‘etymology’ (~morphology) chapter on verbs, or the syntax part, or
in sections on ‘false syntax’ or ‘vulgarisms’. For this reason, I decided against

9
The greatest gap is found in Irving and Mann 1876 [1821]; Lennie 1863 [1810]; Cobbin 1864 [1828];
G. Brown 1857 [1823]; T. Harvey 1900 [1869]; and Comly 1834 [1803].

| Language Between Description and Prescription

14  
a laborious OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process, and browsed and
read the grammars instead, making extensive notes and comments on rel-
evant text passages in the process. In a second step, the text passages were
then transferred into spreadsheets that were thematically ordered (e.g. con-
centrating on past tense forms, comments on the be-​perfect, the progres-
sive, the progressive passive, defining the verb, tense and aspect, etc.). The
text passages were always entered together with the name of the author, the
year of publication, and the author’s national provenance. Once all grammars
were worked through in this way, the information in the spreadsheets could
then be analysed further, comments (or lack of them) were categorized into
groups, ordered chronologically or by region, and results could in this way be
quantified.

1.3.3 Corpora employed
The following chapters deal with known phenomena undergoing change over
the course of the nineteenth century. Since my main focus lies on their treat-
ment in grammars of the time, I will in most cases refer to established corpus
studies that already exist. Sometimes I will complement them with investi-
gations based on newer (or more extensive) materials that I have conducted
for this book, especially in those cases where previous studies were found
wanting, for example because the textual basis was too small (e.g. for past
tense forms of individual lexemes, or for verbs that could still be used with
the be-​perfect). However, the main interest of this book is not a theoretical
discussion of—​say—​t he grammaticalization of the progressive, the theoreti-
cal status of the perfect, or the auxiliarihood of get, nor do I want to provide
detailed synchronic corpus studies of all constraints that influence the phe-
nomena I am interested in. In most cases, this has been done in much detail
by others, and this book will not attempt to duplicate those results. Instead,
I want to give nineteenth-​century voices a room, and document, interpret,
and put into context nineteenth-​century grammarians’ views on a selection
of phenomena. I want to look at their descriptions and opinions in their own
terms, and in the context of their time, particularly where they relate to phe-
nomena of language undergoing change. Historical and synchronic corpus
linguistics in this enterprise therefore becomes an ancillary discipline that
provides us with reliable empirical information, on the basis of which we can
then judge the descriptive adequacy of what the grammars had to say.
Nevertheless, as mentioned above, my ‘take’ on nineteenth-​century gram-
mar writing is a ‘language-​first’ one. By this I mean that the main starting point
in this book for me is features of language that demonstrably undergo change.
In order to determine this starting point, I have had recourse to various materi-
als, many of which are of course well-​known in corpus-​linguistic circles.
Historical materials that cover the Late Modern period adequately only
started to appear in the 1990s with the compilation of A Representative
Corpus of Historical English Registers, or ARCHER (Biber, Finegan, and

In t roduc t ion | 15  

Atkinson 1994; hereafter cited as ARCHER)—​this balanced corpus covers
British and, to a lesser extent, American English from 1650 to 1990, but was
not available to the interested public until the beginning of 2014.10 Studies
based on the first version of ARCHER (in retrospect called ARCHER 1) were
among the first to take language change in the nineteenth century seriously
(e.g. Kytö 1997; Hundt 2001, 2004a, 2004b), and I will rely on these earlier
studies to point out interesting areas that merit more detailed investigations.
ARCHER 1 contained 1.7 million words, spread evenly over ten registers: jour-
nals/​diaries, letters, fictions, news, legal opinion, medicine, science; fictional
conversation, drama, and sermons-​homilies. Divided into 50-​year periods, the
data in ARCHER 1 covered all half-​centuries for British English, but only three
50-​year periods for American English (1750–​, 1850–​, and 1950–​). According to
Biber, Finegan, and Atkinson (1994), individual periods contain about 20,000
words per register. As we will see, the size of ARCHER does not really allow
for medium-​to-​low frequency items to be investigated over time, and is thus
too small for studies of past tense forms of individual lexemes, verbs used
in the be-​perfect, or investigations of the get-​passive in individual registers.
Some of the uneven distribution of data across periods has been remedied in
ARCHER 3.2, which, however, only became available after the empirical stud-
ies for this book had already been conducted. Even with a size of 3.3 million
words, ARCHER 3.2 can still be shown to be too small for the lexeme-​specific
diachronic investigations that will be of interest here.
A more specialist corpus restricted to the nineteenth century (and to
British English) is Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén, and Erik Smitterberg’s CONCE,
the Corpus of Nineteenth Century English (cf. Smitterberg 2005; Kytö,
Rydén, and Smitterberg 2006), not available to researchers outside the place
of compilation. CONCE contains one million words spread over three peri-
ods (1800–​1830, 1850–​1870, and 1870–​1900), and over seven genres (debates,
drama, fiction, history, letters, science, and trials). In contrast to ARCHER,
registers are not evenly represented, but letters make up about a third of all
texts, followed by trials and fiction (at around 20% and 11%, respectively).
CONCE is thus leaning towards the speech-​based end of registers much more
than ARCHER is.
Historical materials for American English, rather underrepresented in cor-
pus linguistics during much of the twentieth century, have become widely
available with the publication of COHA, the Corpus of Historical American
English (Davies 2010;​hereafter cited as COHA). COHA contains 400 mil-
lion words spanning the years 1810 to the 1990s. It is divided into four text
types: newspapers, magazines, fiction, and non-​fiction books. However, here
some imbalances are also to be found. For example, material from newspapers
does not start until the 1860s, and earlier decades contain less material than
later ones. Despite these caveats, it is now becoming possible to investigate

10
Access to ARCHER 3.2 is available via http://​manchester.ac.uk/​archer/​.

| Language Between Description and Prescription

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