📄 Eighteenth-century Female English Grammar Writers: Their ‘Critical’ Voice in the Prefaces to Their Grammars

Paper · 2014 · Dolores Fernández Martínez

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

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🎓Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran CanariaLas Palmas de Gran Canaria · Spain3 works · 1 citation

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Cite as Dolores Fernández Martínez. 2014. Eighteenth-century Female English Grammar Writers: Their ‘Critical’ Voice in the Prefaces to Their Grammars. NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.35360/njes.294

@article{martinez2014eighteenth,
  title = {{Eighteenth-century Female English Grammar Writers: Their ‘Critical’ Voice in the Prefaces to Their Grammars}},
  author = {Dolores Fernández Martínez},
  journal = {NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 13},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.35360/njes.294},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.294}
}

References

6 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Abstract The eighteenth century was a crucial period in the history of English grammar writing. The purpose of this study is to carry out a critical discourse analysis on the prefaces of some English grammars written for schools by female English grammar-writers. In a male-dominated context of grammar production, prefaces turned into strategic instruments which allowed female grammarians to make their voices heard. By examining identification systems (Martin 1992) and transitivity structures (Halliday 2004), this study will illustrate the discourse patterns employed by female grammarians to exercise authority and to produce a persuasive effect on the reader. find
2. Key words: critical discourse analysis, systemic functional grammar, English grammars, eighteenth century 1. Introduction 2 The eighteenth century was a crucial period in the history of English grammar writing and in the process of codification of the English language. Growing interest, among the upper classes, in the vernaculars and in the proper use of the language led to a significant increase in the output of grammars (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008a). Eighteenth-century grammarians were mainly concerned with fixing the English language, trying to meet the demand of the reading public looking for a systematic representation of the language. “Grammar writers became ‘authorities’ on what was ‘proper’ and ‘correct’ in English. [...] We see the beginnings of the link between standard This article is part of the research project FFI2011-25683 funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competition (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad), State Secretariat for Research, Development and Innovation. 2 The present study is based on a previous work by Fernández Martínez (in press), which illustrates a preliminary systematic codification of transitivity structures with a persuasive function in the prefaces which have also been selected for the present paper. find
3. Fernández Martínez, Dolores. 2014. “Eighteenth-century Female English Grammar Writers: Their ‘Critical’ Voice in the Prefaces to Their Grammars.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 13(1):78-103. our card
4. Eighteenth-century Female English Grammar Writers language and the nation-state which was to dominate educational discourse until well into the twentieth-century” (Watts 1995: 173). The battle for the dominance of the editorial market led to a gradual increase in grammatical productivity, especially noticeable during the second half of the century. Publishers at that time employed particular strategies to make grammars appealing to prospective buyers (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008c: 121). The demanding conditions of publishing houses also influenced grammarians who turned the prefaces to their works into highly strategic introductory explanations of the content, audience, structure and methodology of the grammar. Emphasis has been placed on the basic pragmatic function of prefaces as paratextual elements (Genette & Maclean 1991: 268). 3 Rather than communicating pure information (e.g., the name of the author or the date of publication), they impart an authorial or editorial intention. As stated by Genette & Maclean (1991: 269), “the functions of the paratext constitute a very empirical and very diverse object, which must be derived in an inductive way, genre by genre and often species by species”. Thus, considering the editorial pressure at that time, prefaces must have gone beyond the common pragmatic role traditionally attached to them; they must have acted as powerful textual support conveying a high degree of authority over the reader. Therefore, these introductory sections should be assessed as symptomatic of the sense of grammar writers as a discourse community in itself. Grammar writes of English shared a commitment to the discursive practices in their joint enterprise to produce norms of linguistic correctness (Watts 2008: 45; Straaijer 2011: 233). From the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, English grammarians presented similarities in their discourse strategies, socio-communicative objectives and cognitive assumptions, which justified their being considered a discourse community (Watts 1995: 171). More specifically, within English grammars, prefaces are to be evaluated as the pragmatic focus of the strategies on the readers with several purposes at once. Indeed, they are indicative of the The paratext is a basically heterogeneous and auxiliary discourse devoted to the service of something else, namely the text: “this text rarely appears in its naked state, without the reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain number of productions, themselves verbal or not, like an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations” (Genette & Maclean 1991: 261). find
5. Martin (2000: 275) explains how both fields have been closely connected ever since the beginnings of critical linguistics: “For many, one of the real strengths of SFL in the context of CDA work is its ability to ground concerns with power and ideology in the detailed analysis of texts as they unfold, clause by clause, in real contexts of language use [...]”. Previous research has also given evidence of the flexibility of systemic functional grammar to be applied to earlier stages of the English language (e.g. Cummings 1995; Davies 1996). Likewise, CDA has been adaptable to the study of texts from earlier periods (e.g. Wood 2004; Fernández Martínez 2007). 5 Discourse analysts have examined critically various genres of institutional and professional discourse, namely educational discourse (e.g. Sinclair & Eighteenth-century Female English Grammar Writers CDA has been the application of critical thought to any text or public space, unveiling hidden (or partially-hidden) strategies. The purpose of this work to study the prefaces to eighteenth-century English grammars fits in with the ‘critical’ perspective of penetrating into different fields of investigation of language use, with the further incentive of paying attention to a rather unexplored type of text. In the eighteenth century the competition of grammarians to control the reading market must have left its social imprint on the written text. As there were no established writing conventions, grammarians tended to display a persuasive authority of their own, especially perceptible in the prefaces to their grammars. Prefaces written since the Old English period have attracted the attention of scholars as textual exercise of authority (e.g. Discenza 2001; Harbus 2007). Research in the English grammatical tradition has thrived in recent years placing a major emphasis on the rules laid down in eighteenth-century grammars (e.g. find
6. Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008b; Hickey 2010). And also, some references have been made to the upbeat tone of their prefaces and the traits of authority shown by the writers (Hodson 2008: 179-180; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009: 78; 2010: 2; Straaijer 2011: 174). However, the function of eighteenth-century prefaces to English grammars, as especially authoritative paratextual elements, merits further attention from a CDA point of view. The prefaces analysed in this paper have been selected from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECEG), a new database of eighteenth-century grammars and grammar-writers compiled by Rodríguez-Gil & Yáñez-Bouza (2010). This electronic database provides scholars with a resource for interdisciplinary studies on the eighteenth century. It contains bibliographic information of eighteenth-century grammars of the English language, as well as biographical information of their grammar-writers. The prefaces under analysis correspond to English grammars written for schools by female English grammar-writers. They have been retrieved by selecting the following parameters: (i) ‘female’ for gender, (ii) ‘England’ for place of birth of the author, (iii) ‘English grammar’ for type of work, and Coulthard 1975), politics (e.g. Wodak 1989), media communication (e.g. Teo 2000) and medical discourse (e.g. Fleischman 2001), among many others. find

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