Eighteenth-century English: Ideology and change represents another significant contribution to English historical linguistics in the Studies in English Language series (Cambridge University Press) under the supervision of Merja Kytö. The volume, edited by Raymond Hickey, contains sixteen essays by leading scholars whose main research interests include the development of English in the Late Modern period. The book therefore serves as a useful companion to its predecessor on the nineteenth century (Nineteenth-century English: Stability and change, 2006, edited by Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg), and testifies to the increasing interest that English in the Late Modern period has recently come to enjoy among historical linguists. Eighteenth-century English, then, joins the monographs (Bailey Reference Bailey1996; Görlach Reference Görlach1999, Reference Görlach2001; Beal Reference Beal2004; Tieken-Boon van Ostade Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2009, among others), collections of papers (Dossena & Jones Reference Dossena and Jones2003; Pérez-Guerra et al. Reference Pérez-Guerra, González-Alvarez, Bueno-Alonso and Rama-Martínez2007; Tieken-Boon van Ostade Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2008; Tieken-Boon van Ostade & van der Wurff Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2009; Beal, Fitzmaurice & Hodson Reference Beal, Fitzmaurice and Hodson2012) and conferences (the Late Modern English Conferences 1–4) which, over the last fifteen years or so, have helped to improve our understanding of this stage in the history of the English language, and hence to compensate for the traditional neglect of the period.

In addition to the sixteen individual chapters and the expected sections of lists of figures (p. ix), maps (p. x) and tables (p. xi), notes on the contributors (pp. xii–xvi), preface (pp. xvii–xviii), primary sources (pp. 360–70), corpora and online resources (pp. 370–1), secondary sources (pp. 371–402), and author (pp. 414–21) and subject indexes (pp. 422–6), the book also contains a timeline which conveniently sets out for the reader the major political, social and cultural events which occurred between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries (pp. 339–59), as well as a final section by the editor entitled ‘Late Modern English language studies’ (pp. 403–13), which testifies to the vast array of works on the English language published during the eighteenth century, including dictionaries, grammars and works on elocution and on pronunciation. Another of Hickey's achievements is the careful editing of the volume. Though some occasional typographical errors and textual inconsistencies can be found (e.g. gramar for grammar (75), compete for complete (309), sociolinguisitcs for sociolinguistics (396), among others), the book is very professionally edited, despite its length.

The volume opens with a chapter by Raymond Hickey entitled ‘Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English’ (pp. 1–20). Rather than providing a summary of the different contributions, in the manner of conventional introductory chapters in such volumes, Hickey's contribution serves to set the scene of the eighteenth century, discussing the most important attitudes towards language and language change at the time and introducing some of the central issues taken up and expanded in the individual contributions that follow. (Some explanation would have been appreciated, however, of the particular arrangement of the different chapters in the volume.) The range of topics discussed in this condensed introductory chapter includes the internal stability of the eighteenth century in political terms (in comparison to the ‘violent upheavals’ of the previous century), the scarcity of categorical shifts in the grammar, the central role of attitudes on the part of grammarians, lexicographers, etc. towards language variation and change, the proliferation of grammar writing and grammar publishing, as well as the role played in this proliferation by women and by the middle classes, who, in their search for social acceptance, represented the main consumers of dictionaries and books on language at the time, the divergence of the written and the spoken language, the implications of this divergence for grammar writing, the rather common practice of plagiarism (or appropriation) and the idea of (and the desire for) a national language and the deliberate neglect of dialect features, this being closely related to the notion of linguistic insecurity, a theme central to several of the chapters in the volume.

One such chapter is that of Joan C. Beal (chapter 2). With the highly descriptive title ‘Prescriptivism and the suppression of variation’ (pp. 21–37), Beal discusses eighteenth-century attitudes towards phonological variation and the tendency towards the codification of English pronunciation. While the view that certain types of pronunciation were superior to others had been around for at least two centuries, the accounts of pronunciation by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators (Puttenham, Gil and Cooper, among others) lack the explicit prescription or proscription of specific features, and concentrate instead on cases which represented a deviation from writing. As Beal remarks, ‘readers are told where and from whom the most prestigious pronunciation can be heard, but are not advised to adopt or avoid any particular sequence of phonemes’ (p. 21). Rather neutral descriptions of social and geographical variation are also the norm among grammarians and elocutionists from the early eighteenth century: though they recognize the existence of social and regional diversity, they do not normally comment on it in derogatory terms. Codification of the forms characterizing the ‘best’ speech, i.e. the prescription of ‘good’ variants and the proscription of ‘bad’ ones, is really a feature of the second half of the century, with works like James Buchanan's Linguae Britannicae Vera Pronuntiatio (1757), Thomas Sheridan's A General Dictionary of the English Language. One object of which, is to establish a plain and permanent standard of pronunciation (1780) and John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791). Some phonological features discussed in these and other works of the time and commented on by Beal in her chapter include the northern pronunciation of <u> in words like cup, the so-called ‘bath broadening’, the ‘Northumbrian burr’ and /h/-dropping. In the context of a widespread desire to achieve relative uniformity in pronunciation, the ‘best’ or ‘correct’ English was associated with that of educated speakers in London, while regional or social variants were regarded as either ‘defects’ or ‘mistakes’ which needed to be suppressed. Of particular interest here is the advice given by both Sheridan and Walker, among others, to the Scots, Irish and Welsh, who were told that, with the help of a good pronouncing dictionary, they could ‘correct’ their ‘rough’, ‘uncouth’, ‘harsh’ and ‘unpleasant’ pronunciation, and thus escape the stigma of their origin. Beal also rightly observes that, since linguistic signs of vulgarity constituted a clear and serious impediment to social mobility, the search of the middle classes (the so-called ‘middling orders’) for social acceptance undoubtedly contributed to paving the way for the establishment of Received Pronunciation in the nineteenth century.

Grammar writing is also a central issue in the contribution by Carol Percy (chapter 3), entitled ‘Women's grammar’ (pp. 38–58). The chapter opens with an assessment of the pioneering work of Elizabeth Elstob, who in 1715 published her Rudiments of Grammar, for the English-Saxon Tongue. Among other merits, Elstob's grammar of Old English is particularly relevant in three ways: it was written in English (not in Latin), it contributed to the on-going debate in eighteenth-century England about the intellectual capacity of women, and it was marketed in part for a female audience, thus anticipating the appeal of women grammarians to women readers commonly found in the paratext of many later works. Of these, Percy devotes a special place to Anne Fisher's A New Grammar (1745), Ellin Devis's The Accidence . . . for Young Ladies (1775) and Lady Ellenor Fenn's The Mother's Grammar (1798), without disregarding the work of other female teacher-grammarians of the late eighteenth century, such as Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Blanch Mercy, Jane Gardiner and Mrs Eves of Birmingham. However, Percy's chapter contains much more than a mere survey of the most important women grammarians of the time. It provides valuable information on the role of women as consumers of grammars in the eighteenth century, and draws interesting comparisons between some women's grammars and the works of their male contemporaries or model grammarians (e.g. Fisher's with John Newbery's An Easy Introduction to the English Language, 1745). There is also a discussion of the importance of the recognition of the role of women as mothers and educators of their children and as innovators in the domain of vernacular pedagogy, as well as a wealth of bibliographical information on grammar writing in general (by both men and women) in the eighteenth century.

Percy's chapter provides a convenient link to the two contributions by Tieken-Boon van Ostade, ‘Eighteenth-century women and their norms of correctness’ (chapter 4; pp. 59–72) and ‘Lowth as an icon of prescriptivism’ (chapter 5; pp. 73–88). In the former, the author provides a number of interesting cases of eighteenth-century women who generally found their models of linguistic correctness in male figures in their immediate social context, mostly brothers, fathers or renowned friends. For instance, Betsy Sheridan and Elizabeth Clift had brothers who served as both social and linguistic examples to them. Similarly, Henry Fielding was a particularly strong influence on the writings of his sister Sarah, not only as a reviewer of her first novel (Henry seems to be responsible for a number of corrections in orthography, punctuation and grammar), but also for making Sarah aware of the existence of different spelling conventions for private correspondence and for printed texts. Also aware of the current norms of correctness was the writer Fanny Burney, whose principal model appears to have been Dr Johnson himself. Though not particularly interested in learning Latin, for instance, Fanny's developing linguistic sensitivity can be seen in the grammatical differences between her novels Evelina (1778) and Camilla (1796), as well as in her corrections to the second edition of Camilla (1802). A particularly prominent place in Tieken-Boon van Ostade's chapter is occupied by the case of the linguistic relationship between Edward Synge and his daughter Alicia. In the more than two hundred letters he wrote to his daughter between 1746 and 1752, Synge taught his child current spelling conventions, notions of politeness and (most importantly) correct grammar. In Tieken-Boon van Ostade's words, Synge's letters ‘functioned specifically as a “pedagogical tool”’ (p. 66), through which he pointed out the grammatical deficiencies in his daughter's correspondence to him, proscribing her uses of ‘bad’ or ‘false English’ and prescribing correct usage. The linguistic issues raised by Synge in his letters include the use of who for whom and whom for who, the omission of the relative, the improper use of prepositions and the lack of concord between subject and verb, among others. Particularly interesting is the parallel established here by Tieken-Boon van Ostade between Synge and Robert Lowth, whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) was originally devised as a grammar for his son Thomas Henry. Following a similar normative approach by means of the use of negative examples, both fathers had the same purpose in mind: to teach their children linguistic correctness as an instrument of social improvement. They differed, however, in method: ‘Lowth did so by writing a grammar proper, Synge merely by correcting the grammatical mistakes made by his daughter in her letters to him’ (p. 70).

Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), indeed, is dealt with in detail in Tieken-Boon van Ostade's second contribution to the volume. Traditionally considered as the major representative of eighteenth-century prescriptivism, Lowth is presented in this chapter in a somewhat different light. By focusing on three prescriptive strictures frequently associated with him, double negation, preposition stranding and the split infinitive, it is shown that Lowth's reputation as an arch-prescriptivist is unjustified. Although it is popularly believed that he is responsible for the disappearance of double negation from the standard, Tieken-Boon van Ostade convincingly demonstrates that such a stricture does not have its origin in Lowth's 1762 grammar, but had been discussed by other eighteenth-century normative grammarians before him. Lowth is also credited with the stricture against preposition stranding, yet a close analysis of the discussion of this phenomenon in his grammar shows that, as with double negation, he formulates the rule not in a prescriptive way, but rather in ‘strictly and carefully descriptive’ (p. 80) terms. These two strictures only became truly normative rules when they were copied (either with or without acknowledgement) in increasingly prescriptive terms by later grammarians (cf. Lindley Murray's treatment of double negation in his English Grammar of 1795). The third construction discussed by Tieken-Boon van Ostade here in her reassessment of Lowth's legacy is that of the split infinitive. The historical accuracy of later views of Lowth as the embodiment of eighteenth-century prescriptive ideology seems even more doubtful with respect to this structure than in the case of the previous two. It is shown here that the split infinitive rule does not appear in Lowth's grammar (nor in any other grammar produced in the eighteenth century), but was in fact formulated during the course of the nineteenth century. The evidence provided in this chapter, then, seriously challenges the widely accepted view of Robert Lowth as ‘the usual suspect’ (Beal Reference Beal2004: 111) to take the blame for some of the best-known shibboleths of English grammar propagated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tieken-Boon van Ostade not only contributes to a reappraisal of Lowth's figure, but also to a recognition of the achievements of eighteenth-century normative grammar in general, ‘which primarily concerned the codification of the language by laying down the rules of grammar for those who wished to improve themselves linguistically or socially, or both’ (p. 87).

Women's essential role as educators of their children, already discussed in chapter 3 by Percy, is brought to the fore in the contribution by Karlijn Navest, a researcher on the project The Codifiers and the English Language: Tracing the Norms of Standard English, University of Leiden. With the title ‘Queeney Thrale and the teaching of English grammar’ (chapter 6; pp. 89–105), Navest's chapter takes the reader to the Thrale household from 1769 onwards, when Hester Lynch Thrale, a literary hostess and close friend of Dr Johnson, started teaching grammar to her young daughter Hester Maria, better known by the nickname Queeney. Judging from the information in her mother's diary, Queeney received her first grammar lesson when she was only ‘four Years and nine Months old’, and progressed very rapidly after that (at the age of nine, Queeney started learning Italian, Spanish and French also). Unlike many other women of her time, Mrs Thrale felt confident in her own knowledge of English grammar and therefore decided to instruct her daughter herself. As shown by Navest, the effectiveness of Mrs Thrale's grammar lessons appears to be seen in Queeney's use of language in her letters, which is in accordance with the norms of correctness of the time (pp. 102–4). The central issue addressed in this chapter, however, is that of which English grammar(s) Hester Lynch Thrale may have used to teach her child. After considering various possibilities (the grammar prefixed to Dr Johnson's Dictionary (1755), Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), Ash's Grammatical Institutes (1760) and Newbery's An Easy Introduction to the English Language (1745)), Navest comes to the plausible, though rather speculative, conclusion that Mrs Thrale ‘devised her own teaching scheme’ and ‘might not even have felt the urge to use a grammar book during the first grammar lessons’ (p. 100). If this was in fact the case, Mrs Thrale must indeed be recognized as a pioneer in her time, as Navest suggests.

With Susan Fitzmaurice's chapter ‘Coalitions, networks and discourse communities in Augustan England: the Spectator and the early eighteenth-century essay’ (pp. 106–32), we return to the first decades of the century, more precisely to the early 1710s. By invoking the concept of discourse community developed in applied linguistics, adopting a social networks approach and using corpus linguistics methodology (see below), the chapter explores the linguistic distinctiveness of the essays produced by those writers closely associated with the Spectator, in the context of the broader discourse community of essay writers at the time. The first part of the chapter (sections 2 and 3) sets the scene for the keyword analysis provided in section 4, focusing on the features which characterized the production and distribution of early eighteenth-century essays and on the relevance of the Spectator (probably the most popular periodical paper of the time) as a powerful cultural, political, social and linguistic force in contemporary England. Fitzmaurice then provides the findings of her keyword study (pp. 116–31), where she looks at the significance of unusually frequent items (positive keywords) and unusually infrequent ones (negative keywords) and of their collocational patterns in the Spectator essays. This is done by examining the top keywords in the target corpus (the issues of the Spectator published between October 1711 and June 1712, written mostly by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, along with various other contributors; around 300,000 words) relative to the frequency of these items in the reference corpus of essays collected in the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts (NEET). Features such as the high-frequency of first-person singular pronominal forms, the low frequency of third-person plural pronouns, of the old-fashioned -th inflection for the third-person singular present of the verb have (hath) and of the contracted form tis, among others, indicate that the Spectator writers can indeed be regarded as a group with shared linguistic practices and conventions, distinct from those of the broader essay community of early eighteenth-century London.

From the analysis of the linguistic distinctiveness of the Spectator writers we come to two chapters which discuss politeness in eighteenth-century England from different perspectives: ‘Contextualising eighteenth-century politeness: social distinction and metaphorical levelling’ (chapter 8; pp. 133–58), by Terttu Nevalainen and Heli Tissari, and ‘Expressive speech acts and politeness in eighteenth-century English’ (chapter 9; 159–81), by Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker. The former builds on earlier work by the authors on three sets of cultural keywords of politeness, polite-politeness, civil-civility and courteous-courtesy, between 1500 and 1800 (Nevalainen & Tissari Reference Nevalainen, Tissari, Caie, Hough and Wotherspoon2006), and thus serves as a further complement to works on the notion of politeness in the eighteenth century, such as Fitzmaurice (Reference Fitzmaurice1998) and Shoemaker (Reference Shoemaker2004). By looking at the occurrences of these three sets of ‘polite’ words in the eighteenth-century Extension of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEECE), the study focuses on (i) the frequency of occurrence of the forms and their collocational properties (sections 3 and 4); (ii) a sociolinguistic account of their use by different segments of society (section 5); and (iii) an analysis of politeness in terms of Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory (sections 6 to 9). Key findings from these different though complementary approaches to eighteenth-century politeness include the following: (a) in general, eighteenth-century letter writers were more concerned about ‘civility’ than about ‘politeness’, the use of the polite set falling dramatically in the last two decades of the century (see figure 8.1, p. 139); (b) collocationally, the civil set and the polite set display a number of similarities, which suggests a degree of synonymy and complementarity between them; nevertheless, the two adjectives also differ in several other respects, including their frequency in premodifying function, the expression of the beneficiary and their patterns of coordination; (c) sociolinguistically, the analysis reveals a number of interesting differences in the application of the polite and the civil sets concerning gender (see figure 8.2, p. 143) and social status (see figure 8.3, p.145), with civil covering a wider social spectrum than polite; (d) finally, as regards the cognitive conceptualization of politeness, Nevalainen and Tissari convincingly show that, despite the aforementioned differences between the polite set and the civil set in both their lexical and social contexts, letter writers from the eighteenth century conceptualized these words in rather similar ways at the metaphorical level, with source domains like entity, substance, exchange and instrument contributing to metaphors for both target domains civility and politeness.

In the second of the chapters dealing with politeness, ‘Expressive speech acts and politeness in eighteenth-century English’, Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker describe, discuss and illustrate two related speech acts belonging to the group of expressives, more specifically those conveying the feeling of gratitude or appreciation about something in relation to the addressee: compliments and thanks. The contribution provides us with interesting insights into the prominent role of politeness and of politeness ideology in the eighteenth century, stressing the most important differences between the forms and functions of these two types of expressives in eighteenth-century English and in the contemporary language. Among the diachronic changes taking place in this domain, the chapter emphasizes the partial eighteenth-century overlap between compliments and thanks, which shows that ‘the field of inherently polite speech acts was not divided in the way it is now’ (p. 167), together with the development towards more private and personal functions of the two speech acts over the course of time. Thus, eighteenth-century compliments usually came in the form of what Taavitsainen and Jucker call the ‘ceremonious compliment’, which shows a much wider range of functions (e.g. welcoming, expressing condolence, expressing thanks) than the personal compliment characteristic of Present-day English. As regards thanks, although its core function is similar in both periods (the expression of the subjective feeling of gratitude), the illocutionary force indicating device (IFID) (i.e. the short forms thank you and thanks) is not yet present in the eighteenth-century material. It seems therefore that the development of the modern intersubjective discourse functions of such forms (e.g. marking segments of interaction, such as terminating a conversation) took place after the eighteenth century. The abundant examples used for the analysis are drawn from three sources: (a) handbooks of etiquette and politeness (a fairly popular genre at the time); (b) newspapers (data from the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus, covering the time-span 1671–91); and (c) the Gothic novel The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, first published in 1796. These three genres offer a complementary view of politeness as an established social practice of the period. With their model conversations, educational handbooks (e.g. The New Academy of Compliments, 1781 [1669]) offer ample evidence of the eighteenth-century social norms for complimenting and thanking, together with explanations of the non-verbal signs of polite behaviour (gestures, postures, etc.) which normally accompanied these speech acts. In turn, newspapers provide access to genuine examples of compliments and thanks used in the public sphere among the higher classes of society. Finally, fictional accounts of verbal interaction in novels give evidence of the use of gratitude expressions and other compliments in more private settings. As acknowledged by Taavitsainen and Jucker, the picture remains far from complete, and more comprehensive analyses, including other genres, are needed, especially from the private domains of language.

Chapter 10, ‘Variation and change in eighteenth-century English’ (pp. 182–99), offers us an excellent contribution by the late Richard W. Bailey. Professor Bailey, who passed away in April 2011, was emeritus Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and a leading scholar in the study of the development of English in the Early Modern and Late Modern periods (see, among other publications, his Nineteenth-Century English, 1996). Bailey's chapter would perhaps have served as a perfect opening to the volume, since it introduces the reader to the eighteenth century as a period of great variation (and variability) and remarkable transformation in a wide variety of domains, which are discussed in the other chapters here in a more focused way. In his own chapter Bailey is as lucid, readable and informative as always, providing examples of eighteenth-century variation and change from the fields of lexis (pp. 185–9), morphology (pp. 190–1), syntax (pp. 191–4) and pronunciation (pp. 196–8). Examples are used to illustrate the following central topics in the chapter: (i) the relevance of demographic facts, such as the impressive increase in the number of English speakers worldwide and migration (both social and geographical), to certain linguistic developments taking place in the period, particularly in vocabulary expansion; (ii) the common eighteenth-century clash between the principles of ‘reason and regularity’, on the one hand, and ‘elegance and propriety’, on the other, perfectly exemplified by Bailey with the conflict between the forms hisself and himself; and (iii) the large amount of individual variation characteristic of the period. The existence of such individual variability in eighteenth-century English, shown in the chapter through a range of examples from the writings of Fanny Burney and Benjamin Franklin, including pronoun usage (you and I vs you and me), past participle variation (broke vs broken) and fluctuation between full forms and their contracted counterparts (you have vs you've), is interpreted by Bailey as reflecting a ‘willingness to accept variation as normal’ (p. 199).

Variation in the domain of syntax is the topic of Teresa Fanego's contribution (chapter 11; pp. 200–20), which adds to the author's extensive earlier research on the historical development of the English complementation system. As indicated in the title, ‘Variation in sentential complements in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English: a processing-based explanation’, the chapter covers a much wider time frame than most of the other chapters in the volume, including the whole of the Late Modern English period (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and in addition looks both backward and forward in time to Early Modern English and to the contemporary language. The chapter thus provides the reader with a more comprehensive view of a long-term grammatical development in the domain of non-finite complementation, that is, the encroachment of gerundives on to-infinitives, which has its origin in the Late Middle English period and continues in the present day. More specifically, the focus is on the replacement of preverbal subject infinitives by gerundives (e.g. Inviting the twins was a bad mistake). The author shows how this process, which is attested since around the late eighteenth century, becomes increasingly significant from the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in American English, another sign – in Fanego's view – of the trend towards the ‘Americanization’ of British English in recent times. As to the variables controlling the spread of -ing clauses to preverbal subject position at the expense of to-infinitives in the history of the language, syntactic weight appears to have been the major factor: in Fanego's data, gerundive subjects are, on average, lighter than their infinitival counterparts (see table 11.5, p. 216). Interestingly, the author interprets her findings in the light of the processing principles put forward in John A. Hawkins's performance-based theory of grammar (Reference Hawkins1994, Reference Hawkins2004), and herein lies the main novelty of Fanego's contribution. In particular, she relates the change to the speakers’ attempts to increase efficiency and reduce complexity, thus complying with the requirements of Hawkins's efficiency principles of form minimization and domain minimization, with functional specialization, avoidance of synonymy and reduction of formal marking as the desired effects.

With the following two contributions the reader moves on to the description of the English language spoken in the eighteenth century in Scotland and Ireland. Chapter 12, entitled ‘Nationality and standardisation in eighteenth-century Scotland’ (pp. 221–34), is written by one of the most prominent scholars in the study of Scots, Professor Charles Jones. The chapter provides a concise account of the attitudes to Scots both in England and in Scotland over the course of the century, also emphasizing the great intellectual and scientific accomplishments in the Enlightenment period of figures like Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Walter Scott and Robert Burns, among many others. Using a wealth of quotations from contemporary sources, Jones shows how the neutral early eighteenth-century attitudes to Scots (Scots was seen simply as different, but of equal status to southern forms of English) soon gave way to a far less tolerant view of regional variation and linguistic plurality in the latter part of the century. In the context of the strong prescriptive culture of the time (cf. chapter 2 by Beal), Scots came to be described in increasingly pejorative terms, with many Scots words, phrases and pronunciations being regarded as ‘corruptions’, ‘barbarisms’ or ‘vulgarities’. Particularly relevant figures referred to in Jones's contribution include James Beattie (Scotticisms Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing, 1787), and especially Thomas Sheridan and John Walker, whose dictionaries (also discussed in the chapters by Beal and Mugglestone) contain lists of pronunciations where Scottish speakers are ‘liable to err’. Jones also comments extensively on the opposing late eighteenth-century attitudes towards what kind of language could be chosen in the formation of a Scottish standard (the debate was whether it should come close to standard London English, being devoid of the most extreme Scottish features, or whether a more Scottish form of language should be promoted as an expression of national identity) and provides ‘a flavour’ of the most salient phonological characteristics of what James Adams (1799) described as the ‘tempered medium’ of Scots and Alexander Scott (1971) called ‘Caledonian Scotch’.

In the longest contribution in the volume (chapter 13; pp. 235–68), Raymond Hickey looks at the development of English in Ireland in the eighteenth century, ‘at once a period of blossoming and decline, of liberty and oppression’ (p. 237). From his very extensive knowledge of Irish English, Hickey describes the complex linguistic picture of Ireland at this time by structuring the chapter around four major themes. The first concerns the kind of Irish-influenced English spoken in the south which, through the conventional use of eye dialect, can be traced in the speech of Irish characters used as stock figures in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama for the sake of parody and ridicule (pp. 238–43). Some of the most salient phonological features of eighteenth-century Irish English are conveniently summarized in table 13.1 (p. 241) and illustrated in two short extracts from plays by George Farquhar and Thomas Sheridan. Due attention is also paid here to the figure of Jonathan Swift and his forthright comments against language change expressed in A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language (1712) and the evidence for eighteenth-century pronunciation found in his poetry. Hickey then moves on to discuss the archaic dialectal variety spoken in the rather isolated south-east corner of Ireland, in the baronies of Forth and Bargy (pp. 245–51). This interesting case of linguistic antiquarianism, which clearly ties in with chapter 14 on dialect grammar by Kortmann and Wagner (see below), is examined by the author through evidence from two glossaries and a few texts recorded at the end of the eighteenth century, shortly before the dialect was to die out, in the early nineteenth century. This is followed by the third area discussed by Hickey, the development of Ulster Scots and its transportation to North America by Ulster immigrants suffering from economic and/or religious grievances (pp. 251–63). The focus here is on the most important distinctive features of Ulster Scots when compared with Southern British English regarding vocabulary, vowel length (e.g. the Scottish Vowel Length Rule or Aitken's Law), certain consonantal features (e.g. the realization of the voiceless velar fricative /x/) and grammar (e.g. remnants of nasal and umlaut plurals; co-occurrence of two modals in a single verb phrase; use of the demonstratives thon ‘yon’ and thonder ‘yonder’). This section also discusses some of the characteristic features of dialectal forms of American English, including Appalachian English and African American English, which are supposed to have derived from Ulster Scots input in the eighteenth century. In the final section of the chapter, Hickey examines the influential figure of the Irishman Thomas Sheridan and eighteenth-century linguistic prescriptivism (pp. 263–7), thus establishing appropriate links with earlier and later chapters in the volume, in particular those of Beal (chapter 2) and Mugglestone (chapter 16).

With a title strongly reminiscent of Klemola's ‘Continuity and change in dialect morphosyntax’ (Reference Klemola, Kastovsky, Kaltenböck and Reichl2002), chapter 14, ‘Changes and continuities in dialect grammar’ (pp. 269–92) by Bernd Kortmann and Susanne Wagner, closes the trio of chapters in the volume specifically devoted to non-standard varieties of English. Kortmann and Wagner's contribution testifies to the important limitations of studying non-standard morphosyntactic variation in earlier stages of the language, so far a largely neglected area of research, but succeeds in showing how delving into historical dialect grammar can be deeply rewarding despite the lack of suitable data. The analysis focuses on a number of selected features of dialect syntax which the authors classify as either ‘traditional’ (conservative) or ‘modern’ (innovative) features. The former group comprises various phenomena included in Ihalainen's (Reference Ihalainen and Burchfield1994) catalogue of dialect markers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (see Appendix, pp. 291–2): the Northern Subject Rule, the use of subject personal pronouns in positions which would normally require an object form, and relativizers (pp. 278–85). On the other hand, the section on ‘modern’ (innovative) characteristics (pp. 285–8) discusses two features not included in Ihalainen's catalogue, but which were very likely in use in the Late Modern period, namely pseudo-passives with stood and sat and multiple negation and forms of isn't. The sources used for the analysis include Alexander Ellis's fifth volume of On Early English Pronunciation (1889), a seriously underrated, but particularly useful source of evidence for historical dialectology, The Survey of English Dialects (SED) and the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), which is used by the authors to validate and compare results with findings from the two other sources. The time frame covered by the selected sources leads me to my only complaint about the chapter: as Kortmann and Wagner themselves state, their focus is ‘on the last half of the nineteenth century until the First World War (approximately a seventy-year span from 1850 until 1920’ (p. 278), which makes this excellent and substantial contribution to dialect grammar in earlier English better suited to a volume dedicated to nineteenth- rather than eighteenth-century English. In this context, and in view of the extremely poor situation regarding suitable dialect data before the late nineteenth century, the chapter closes with a plea for the compilation of dialect corpora truly representative of the regional differences of the period, as a means of stimulating further research in the fascinating field of historical dialect grammar.

Also ‘intruding’ into the nineteenth century and beyond, Marina Dossena's contribution, ‘“Be pleased to report expressly”: the development of a public style in Late Modern English business and official correspondence’ (pp. 293–308), analyses the pragmatic strategies used by encoders in official and business letters in order to transmit their messages in socially acceptable ways. Looking at a range of texts dating from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, mostly from the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence, the author aims to identify the features characterizing ‘public-style’ English in the Late Modern period. More specifically, she investigates how concepts such as politeness (cf. chapter 9 by Taavitsainen and Jucker), propriety, (self-)representation, stance and evaluation are conveyed in business and official correspondence of the time depending on the social relationship between the participants and on the object of their exchange. In her analysis, Dossena pays special attention, among other features, to forms of address in salutations, closing formulae in subscriptions, the use of evaluative language and of tokens of (positive and negative) politeness, and modality. The last part of the chapter is devoted to an early twentieth-century letter written in Italian and its non-literal translation into English made by the recipient or by a member of his staff or one of his business partners. The comparison of the two versions of the document reveals remarkable differences between the public style of the original, with its codified formulae, set phrases and politeness moves, and the far less formal English translation, in which formulaic language is omitted as unnecessary. In the words of the author, ‘the text is translated twice, not only from one language to another, but also from one style to another’ (p. 307). In all, Dossena's contribution provides us with interesting insights into the specific requirements and conventions of business and official communication in Scottish Standard English in the course of the Late Modern period, particularly in the nineteenth century.

In the last chapter of the volume, ‘Registering the language – dictionaries, diction and the art of elocution’ (pp. 309–38), Linda Mugglestone takes us on an insightful trip into the world of dictionary-making in the eighteenth century, introducing the reader to the abundance and marked diversity of lexicographic works which characterize the period. Although all the individual components of the modern dictionary were already in existence at the time, Mugglestone's thorough description of the wide range of eighteenth-century dictionaries, differing in size, price, methodology, audience, etc., clearly shows that dictionary-writing was still a noticeably unstable genre at the time, even by the end of the eighteenth century. This absence of a shared and uniform system is made clear by the conflicting interpretations of eighteenth-century lexicographers of the notion of ‘dictionary’ and their practices concerning fundamental matters such as the treatment of polysemy, spelling (e.g. how should words with initial <ph> or <f> be treated?), alphabetical organization (e.g. should <u> and <v>, <i> and <j> be given separate sections within the dictionary or be treated as variant forms of the same grapheme?), and especially the kind of information that the dictionary should include (should obsolete words be omitted? should dictionaries be restricted to dealing with so-called ‘hard words’? should dictionary entries contain only lexical and/or semantic information or also include citational evidence, etymological and part of speech information, pronunciation, or other ‘useful’ data such as the specification of market-days or lists of mythological gods and goddesses?). Defining practices also varied widely, sometimes even within the same work. While the word knife was defined in some dictionaries of the time as ‘an instrument well known’, Dr Johnson rejected the widespread ‘well-known’ formula, and offered the following far more specific definition: ‘an instrument edged and pointed, wherewith meat is cut, and animals killed’. Additional dominant features of eighteenth-century lexicography discussed by Mugglestone in her chapter include outright plagiarism (cf. also chapter 1), the general concern about notions of lexical decorum, and the importance of dictionaries (especially pronouncing dictionaries, such as Sheridan's) as ‘a practical tool, engaged in the process of standardisation, and intentionally facilitating the displacement of specific features of one language variety by another’ (p. 330). The chapter thus establishes a convenient link to the most pervasive topic in this volume, that of the issue of normative ideology and correctness in the eighteenth century.

It is precisely this strong bias of Eighteenth-century English on normative grammar and prescriptivism that sets it apart from its series companion volume on the nineteenth century (Kytö et al. Reference Kytö, Rydén and Smitterberg2006). While most chapters in Nineteenth-century English discuss topics of grammar, such as the passive, relativization, adjectival comparison, non-finite complementation, partitive constructions, etc., only two of the contributions in the volume edited by Hickey are specifically concerned with grammatical issues: chapter 11 by Fanego and chapter 14 by Kortmann and Wagner (see above). As mentioned a number of times in the volume itself (e.g. pp. xvii, 2, 269), as well as elsewhere (e.g., among others, Denison Reference Denison and Romaine1998: 93; Görlach Reference Görlach1999: 484; Aarts, López-Couso & Méndez-Naya Reference Aarts, López-Couso, Méndez-Naya, Bergs and Brinton2012), the eighteenth century is not a period of major categorical changes in English grammar. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that most chapters deal with matters of correctness, standardization and externally motivated change, ‘with language use and the role which individual authors may have played in its development’ (pp. 2–3). In terms of the subtitle of the volume, Ideology and change, there is undoubtedly a greater emphasis on ideology than on change. Although this is to be expected in a book devoted to the period in which prescriptivism established itself in English, more extensive studies of various grammatical domains like genitive constructions, parentheticals, light verb constructions, relativization and complementation across different genres in the eighteenth century, are certainly called for, and could have been given some space here. The wealth of materials (especially corpora) covering the Late Modern English period which have been made available over the last few years will no doubt make this possible in the near future. As Richard W. Bailey puts it, ‘[m]uch happened, and this fascinating century deserves more attention that it has so far been given’ (p. 198). I am confident that the studies in this volume will encourage further investigation into this prolific, yet somewhat neglected, period of the history of the English language.