Anita Auer, Victorina González-Díaz
Eighteenth-century prescriptivism in English: A re-evaluation of its effects on actual language usage
Through a corpus-based analysis of the development of the inflectional
subjunctive and double periphrastic comparison in Modern English, this paper
sets out to investigate the real impact that prescriptive forces may have had on
the contemporary language. The implications of the analysis are twofold: on a
methodological level, the results point to precept and data corpora combinations
as reliable indicators of language use in any given period; on a theoretical
level, they challenge the overall importance that prescriptivism has been
traditionally granted as a key factor in language change.
Multilingua Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0167-8507
Volume: 24, 12/2005
Pages: 317 - 341
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