Communicative competence and eighteenth-century English norms of correctness

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, University of Leiden and Clare Hall, Cambridge
• Monday 07 March 2011, 17:00-18:30
• GR-04, English Faculty Building, West Road.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact David Willis.

Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) is often regarded as having enforced a set of prescriptive rules on the English language. This is a view I have aimed to correct in my recently published book The Bishop’s Grammar. Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (OUP, 2011). In this paper I will focus on the approach I took in trying to do so. Having collected ca. 300 letters as part of Lowth’s private correspondence, I focussed on his communicative competence. Like any speaker and writer of English he was found to vary in his usage − spelling and grammar − depending on such variables as the nature of his relationship with the addressee of his letters, and in doing so he frequently offended (in eighteenth-century terms) against the rules in his own grammar. In reducing linguistic variation − not in fact as optional as sociolinguists tend to view it − Lowth’s grammar, and the increasingly prescriptive grammars coming after him, is simply part of the standardisation process the English language was undergoing at the time.

This talk is part of the Historical Linguistics Research Cluster series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Forum of Science and Humanities
• Cambridge Language Sciences
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• GR-04, English Faculty Building, West Road
• Guy Emerson's list
• Historical Linguistics Research Cluster

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.