A History of English Language

A history of the english language 278
examines newly available manuscript materials. Sterling A.Leonard’s The Doctrine of Correctness
in English Usage, 1700–1800 (Madison, WI, 1929) surveys the points most often in dispute
among the eighteenth-century grammarians. The most comprehensive study of early grammars
of English is lan Michael, English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800
(Cambridge, UK, 1970). A full list of the works of the grammarians will be found in Kennedy’s
Bibliography, supplemented by R.C.Alston, A Bibliography of the English Language…to the
Year 1800 (Leeds, UK, 1965–87). Important also are A.F.Bryan’s “Notes on the Founders of
Prescriptive English Grammar,” Manly Anniversary Studies (Chicago, 1923), pp. 383–93, and
“A Late Eighteenth-Century Purist” (George Campbell), Studies in Philology, 23 (1926), 358–
70. The special circumstances of the Scottish grammatical tradition and Scottish pronunciation
are treated by Charles Jones in A Language Suppressed: The Pronunciation of the Scots
Language in the 18th Century (Edinburgh, 1995). A useful collection of excerpts from
sixteenth- to eighteenth-century writings is Susie I.Tucker, English Examined: Two Centuries of
Comment on the Mother-Tongue (Cambridge, UK, 1961). The same author’s Protean Shape: A
Study in Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary and Usage (London, 1967) discusses a large number
of words that have undergone semantic change since the eighteenth century. The borrowings
from French in this period are treated by Anton Ksoll, Die französischen Lehn-und
Fremdwörter in der englischen Sprache der Restaurationszeit (Breslau, 1933), and Paul Leidig,
Französische Lehnwörter und Lehnbedeutungen im Englischen des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ein
Spiegelbild französischer Kultureinwirkung (Bochum–Langendreer, Germany, 1941; Beiträge
zur engl. Philologie, no. 37). The best brief account of British overseas trade and settlement is
still James A. Williamson, A Short History of British Expansion (2 vols., 6th ed., London and
New York, 1967). For a fuller treatment of the development of progressive verb forms the
student may consult the works referred to in §§ 209–10.