Towards a Dictionary of English Normative Grammar

TOWARDS A DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH NORMATIVE GRAMMAR Bertil Sundby This paper falls into two parts. The first describes in broad outline the Bergen project, "A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 1700-1800" (DENG). The second part is focused on "sequence," one of the grammatical categories dealt with by the dictionary. Sequence claims attention in its own right, and it will be used as a test-case. 1. A status report on DENG Work on the DENG project began in 1980, and the dictionary we have in mind will run to approximately two hundred printed pages. Aside from the entries themselves, the projected dictionary will, among other things, give information on the sources employed, American as well as British, discuss error typologies, explain the grammatical code and method of presentation, illustrate with examples the kind of questions to be answered by the dictionary, and provide a detailed, lemmatized index of technical terms. DENG spans the eighteenth century, but in the end We hope to deal with the time after 1 800 as well. Our aim is to collect and process the forms—mainly syntagmatic ones—that were frowned upon by the early English grammarians. The enquiries we have received so far and the answers ready to hand in our data file have encouraged us to think that the dictionary when completed will interest students of historical grammar and style, in particular sociolinguists concerned with syntactic variation and the relationship between spontaneous usage and prescribed usage. DENG should prove useful to theoretical linguists as an aid to grammatical reconstruction on generative lines, to linguistic historiographers, to students interested in current attitudes toward British usage, and so on. Bishop Lowth (1762), Hugh Blair (1783), Lindley Murray (1795), and other, lesser, members of the profession plead 151 152 A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar eloquently for purity, precision, and perspicuity of expression; but their teaching method is a negative one inasmuch as their books abound in examples of impurity, imprecision, and lack of clarity culled from the works of contemporary writers. Even in the eighteenth century there were reactions to this fault-finding approach to the study of grammar and usage. Thus John Sedger (1798) complains that "most of our grammarians [have] written rather with a view to point out the common errors of speech, than minutely to investigate the genius of the tongue," and Joseph Priestley (1761) is to all intents a descriptive grammarian. Still, both writers are among our sources, although their contribution is modest enough. Topping the frequency list is John Knowles (1796) with some nine hundred instances of "improper" or "inelegant" English. So far we have excerpted ninety-odd books and filed c. 12,000 citations; we now seem to have reached the stage when few if any new types of error are likely to be forthcoming. What, then, are the "types" to be incorporated in the dictionary? Before answering that question we must explain how the concept grammar is defined in the context of DENG. The eighteenth-century grammar-book typically divides into (1) Orthography (sounds and spelling), (2) Prosody (accentuation), (3) Etymology (the parts of speech, inflexion, word-formation), and (4) Syntax (sometimes coupled with punctuation). True to the current definition of grammar (cf., e.g., Fogg 1 792: "the art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety"), they do not draw the line between grammar and lexis as rigidly as some modern schools care to do. Thus among the specimens of erroneous English that are often listed in an appendix we find "false constructions" as well as instances of deviant lexis (confusion of imminent and eminent, the use of mutual in the sense 'common', of expect to mean 'think', and so on). The potentially relevant forms are being kept in store, but it is probable that DENG will eventually restrict itself to accidence and syntagmatics. Inflexion and syntax are in focus, but we also include collocations like different to/from and prevail upon/over and phrasal idioms like curry favor, make bold, cut a pretty figure: the prescriptive grammarians were suspicious of the unitary Bertil Sundby153 meaning of and syntactic constraints on multi-word lexemes. If typology and code depend on our conception of grammar...