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Assessing the Connections between English Grammarians of the Nineteenth Century – A Corpus-Based Network Analysis
Abstract Linguistic studies of nineteenth-century British grammar books are still scarce despite essential changes in the genre during the nineteenth century, such as the decline of so-called prescriptive grammar writing. Since grammarians often use references to other authors to criticise the seemingly inadequate works of predecessors and contemporaries, our study investigates the scholarly network of grammarians’ references in a corpus of nineteenth-century English grammars. We particularly focus on the transition from prescriptive to descriptive grammar writing, showing that this paradigmatic turn in the genre is reflected both in the network of grammarians’ references and in the usage of terms like prescriptive and descriptive in the grammars.
Our study is part of the HeidelGram project, which combines methods from corpus-based diachronic linguistics and network analysis with the aims of offering new perspectives on (meta-)linguistic developments and to reassess well-established assumptions on the history of the genre grammar.
Keywords English grammar, corpus, nineteenth century, prescriptive, network analysis, references
