Eighteenth-century prescriptivism in English: A re-evaluation of its effects on actual language usage

Abstract

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.