Full Description
Historical sociolinguistics has successfully challenged the traditional focus on standardization in linguistic historiography. Extensive research on newly uncovered textual resources has shown the widespread variation in the written language of the past that was previously hidden or neglected. The time has come to integrate both perspectives, and to reassess the importance of language norms, standardization and prescription on the basis of sound empirical studies of large corpora of texts.
The chapters in this volume discuss the interplay of language norms and language use in the history of Dutch, English, French and German between 1600 and 1900. Written by leading experts in the field, each chapter focuses on one language and one century. A substantial introductory chapter puts the twelve research chapters into a comparative perspective.
The book is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology and social history to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.
Contents
1. Acknowledgements; 2. The interplay of language norms and usage patterns. Comparing the history of Dutch, English, French and German (by Rutten, Gijsbert); 3. Dutch; 4. Language norms and language use in seventeenth-century Dutch: Negation and the genitive (by Nobels, Judith); 5. Language norms and language use in eighteenth-century Dutch: Final n and the genitive (by Simons, Tanja); 6. Norms and usage in nineteenth-century Southern Dutch (by Vosters, Rik); 7. English; 8. Norms and usage in seventeenth-century English (by Nevalainen, Terttu); 9. Eighteenth-century English normative grammars and their readers (by Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid); 10. Nineteenth-century English: Norms and usage (by Auer, Anita); 11. French; 12. From l'usage to le bon usage and back: Norms and usage in seventeenth-century France (by Ayres-Bennett, Wendy); 13. Jacques-Louis Menetra and his experience of the langue d'oc (by Lodge, R. Anthony); 14. From local to supra-local: Hybridity in French written documents from the nineteenth century (by Martineau, France); 15. German; 16. Language description, prescription and usage in seventeenth-century German (by McLelland, Nicola); 17. Standard German in the eighteenth century: Norms and use (by Langer, Nils); 18. Prescriptive norms and norms of usage in nineteenth-century German (by Elspass, Stephan); 19. Index
