This thorough and satisfying study advances our understanding of Late Modern English and of normative linguistics, both relatively recent fields. The relationships between grammatical precept and practice in eighteenth-century English have engaged the pioneering Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade for several decades; one culmination of her studies was her monograph on the grammarian Robert Lowth (Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2011). Scholars including her and Susan Fitzmaurice (formerly Wright) used customized corpora and methods including social network theory to understand how linguistic norms spread in this century of correctness. As digitized historical texts and structured linguistic corpora representing Late Modern English have proliferated more recently, they and other scholars have aimed to trace the standardization process of specific variants in even larger-scale projects. Lieselotte Anderwald's Language between Description and Prescription: Verbs and Verb Categories in Nineteenth-Century Grammars of English (Reference Anderwald2016) is a recent study of the nineteenth century. The present monograph is among a number that began at the University of Manchester as doctoral dissertations: others include Victorina González-Díaz's on English adjective comparison (Reference González-Díaz2008) and Anita Auer's cross-cultural study of the subjunctive (Reference Auer2009). All these and other scholars investigating ‘precept effect on usage’ are acknowledged in the introductory chapter of Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English: Preposition Placement 1500–1900, and their findings are outlined in the first of its many helpful appendices. The same appendix includes individual author studies as well as large-scale ones: indeed, the seventeenth-century author and critic John Dryden (1631-1700) is central to this work.
Preposition placement in English is a particularly appropriate issue for investigation – or reinvestigation. It has long been known that in his Defence of the Epilogue (1672) John Dryden criticized the ‘Preposition in the end of the sentence’ in Ben Jonson's work and corrected it in the 1684 edition of his Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668) (e.g. Bately Reference Bately1964). But because Dryden did not explain himself, it has generally been assumed that ‘Latin is probably involved’ (Webster's 1989). As a literary author and critic, Dryden was positioning himself as more modern than Jonson by commenting on the commonness of stranded prepositions in Jonson's writings and removing them from his own. As a prescriptivist, Dryden was not only advanced but very much in the vanguard; indeed, modern reference works like Webster's Dictionary of English Usage report that concern about preposition stranding ‘seems to have originated with . . . Dryden’ (1989). Linguistic prescriptivism more generally has been studied as a phenomenon of the second half of the eighteenth century. Near the beginning of the present book, a graph charts the production of English grammars since the sixteenth century and their increase during the eighteenth. And a subsequent table displays the rising number of prescriptive texts more generally, authors and (especially) comments about preposition stranding through the eighteenth century, dramatically increasing in the second half. Its author's visual aids are elegant and effective.
Why did Dryden avoid preposition stranding? And (how) did the precepts of Dryden and others relate to practice? In this comprehensive and resourceful study, Yáñez-Bouza begins by surveying precepts and practice, explaining her ‘Methodology’ in chapter 2. The English normative tradition traditionally begins in the eighteenth century, as we see from the title (and the contents) of DENG, the Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 1700–1800 (1991). While the editors of DENG collected and classified negative comments from first editions of English grammars, Yáñez-Bouza compiled an even more exhaustive corpus of comments – neutral and positive as well as negative. Crucially, her structured eighteenth-century corpus includes not only multiple editions of grammars published as monographs or as paratexts to other reference works, but also rhetorical treatises; overall, she surveys nearly three times as many authors as DENG. Her findings are summarized in chapter 3, ‘Eighteenth-century precept’. She provides some dramatic antedatings of DENG: for instance, she identifies Greenwood (1711) rather than Kirkby (1746) as the first eighteenth-century author to comment negatively on preposition stranding. And because she collects and rigorously classifies neutral and positive as well as negative comments, her observations are nuanced as well as general. From her precept corpus, she confirms that comments became both more frequent and more critical in the second half of the century. And although the structured precept corpus spans only the eighteenth century, her thorough research extends well beyond it: as well as confirming the influence of eighteenth-century authors into the nineteenth, she traces the emerging traditions of seventeenth-century criticism. By persistent synthesis of secondary references and a wide range of primary texts, Yáñez-Bouza reports the lexicographer Edward Phillips introducing usage labels (1658) and the Quaker George Fox observing the ‘vulgar’ confusion of you and thou (1660). An intriguing figure is Christopher Cooper, whose 1685 grammar was the last English grammar in Latin and the first prescriptive one for English. By considering works in and about Latin, Yáñez-Bouza expands the traditions of English and especially the significance of the seventeenth century. Dryden's attention to the placement of English prepositions seems to have been anticipated by some instructors of Latin.
In chapter 4, Yáñez-Bouza's survey of ‘Usage in Early and Late Modern English’ identifies some equally unambiguous trends, across time and registers. Her methods are transparent: she has judiciously integrated two complementary and authoritative multi-genre corpora, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (c. 730–1710) and A Representative Corpus of Historical English Texts (ARCHER) (1600–1999). And her investigation of the post-medieval periods is informed by her research across the entire history of English: appendix 3 summarizes preposition placement in specific syntactic contexts from Old through Modern English. Indeed, this study will also be useful to scholars of other grammatical constructions, such as phrasal verbs and relative pronouns. But its focus is principally on variation across registers and time. Yáñez-Bouza observes that although preposition stranding increases through the history of English, the increase had stopped in the first half of the eighteenth century and preposition stranding declines in the second half. Indeed, preposition stranding declines even in texts that are informal and/or associated with speech, such as sermons. While summarizing general trends in her corpora, Yáñez-Bouza also examines their samples of individual authors, identifying whose preferences skew some numbers, and demonstrates how many avoid preposition stranding: the latter category includes Smollett (the spelling of whose surname on p. 145 produces perhaps the only typo in this magnificently produced book) and Blair, a clergyman who was also a (prescriptive) rhetorician. Through the nineteenth century, preposition stranding eventually increased, at different rates in different contexts. In general, Yáñez-Bouza's findings corroborate the findings of Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, who in their diachronic register studies also identified the eighteenth century as disrupting the tendency for English to ‘drift’ towards more spoken and informal forms (Reference Biber and Finegan1989). Although her occasional attributions of trends to such constructions as ‘the Romantic Movement’ (e.g. p. 130) might seem overly general, her exhaustive and thoughtful analysis and elegant presentation ensures this study's authority. Her observations about usage confirm that eighteenth-century English grammars cannot have triggered the decline in preposition stranding, which began before critical precepts proliferated. Yáñez-Bouza makes a particularly interesting contribution to English normative linguistics by integrating traditions from the teaching of Latin and English in the seventeenth century.
At the heart of this monograph is its 130-page fifth chapter, which identifies and analyzes three broad trends in the stigmatization of preposition stranding through the history of English. Central to it is John Dryden, exemplifying the potential of the study of (well-chosen) individual authors – as well as the interrelation of what have often been treated as separate linguistic disciplines. Here Yáñez-Bouza demonstrates that when Dryden criticized preposition stranding in English he was considering ‘Grammar, rhetoric and style’. The etymology of the word preposition and the grammatical norms for most Latin prepositions certainly influenced writers’ attitudes to the placement of English prepositions; elite boys became more aware of the structure of English when they used translation and ‘transposition’ as a tool for learning Latin. But Yáñez-Bouza also demonstrates that stylistic and rhetorical concerns contributed to the recession of stranded prepositions from formal and written English and from the ends of clauses and sentences. Latin grammar and rhetoric were connected in English grammar school classrooms, and in the publications of authors like Joshua Poole: his English Accidence (1646) taught the grammar of Latin and his English Parnassus (1657) brought grammar and rhetoric together for the composition of poetry. Was John Dryden the ‘J.D.’ who wrote its preface? With her thorough and resourceful research, Yáñez-Bouza animates influential pedagogical traditions while hinting at specific connections between Dryden and the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the earlier seventeenth century.
Yáñez-Bouza tracks these three discrete traditions as well as the possible influences among authors by using keywords to subclassify comments. Stylistic criticism of stranded prepositions as (for instance) ‘familiar’ and ‘inelegant’ underlines the sensitivity to style of the supposed arch-prescriptivist Robert Lowth (1762), as well as suggesting Lowth's influence on some later writers – and perhaps Dryden's on him. Indeed, her study also traces influences across categories – of Scottish rhetoricians, for instance, on American grammarians like Noah Webster and Lindley Murray. Yáñez-Bouza's sensitive and powerful classification system can identify trends, and exceptions to trends. While the Scottish rhetorician George Campbell argues that the stranding of prepositions can contribute to the ‘vivacity’ of the prose, rhetoricians are generally more hostile to preposition stranding than grammarians, and Scots are more critical than the English. Ann Fisher is the only woman grammarian who makes a positive comment about preposition stranding, unlike other (and later) women grammarians who promote correctness by simplifying the opinions of authoritative grammarians like Lowth and Murray. And not everyone who copied Lowth agreed with him: by carefully tracing illustrative quotations, Yáñez-Bouza can identify authors like John Fell (1784), who used Lowth's examples to contradict his opinions. One of the many incidental pleasures for a reader in these fields is the identification of such empirically distinguished independent authors.
Normative studies by historical linguists are refining how we understand the dynamics of standardization. By tracking the history of a particular variable and by confirming that ‘precept can account for change in the frequency of a particular construction as a change from above’ (p. 309) this monograph has clearly contributed to normative studies. Of course, every variable has its own history: as appendix 1 confirms, precepts might have no effect on usage, or can trigger diachronic change. They can also reinforce changes that are already in progress ‘from below’. It is more difficult (and to me more interesting) to consider how changes spread ‘from below’ consciousness. For instance, the recession of multiple negation (or negative concord) from educated prose is now better understood: Terttu Nevalainen's studies of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence revealed that from the late fifteenth century the construction was receding from the writing of professional and upper-ranking men, long before it was explicitly stigmatized by eighteenth-century grammarians. And through the next centuries negative concord had ‘largely disappeared among the higher ranks, male and female, before the era of prescriptive grammar’ (Nevalainen Reference Nevalainen2006: 264). How did such awareness spread?
In chapter 6, Yáñez-Bouza considers this condition of ‘Latent awareness’ of a variant's status, specifically whether and how Dryden's avoidance of preposition stranding might have influenced subsequent generations. Dryden was a seminal critic of English as well as a canonical author: indeed, Yáñez-Bouza makes the important observation that Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay (1668, 1684) was an acknowledged foundation of the literary-critical tradition of English as well as a possible model for preposition placement (p. 194). Yáñez-Bouza suggests Dryden's stylistic influence by demonstrating the dissemination of his work: his poems dominated literary anthologies and were extracted in grammar books ‘as one of the “best writers” whose language must be imitated and/or corrected’ (p. 288). With thorough research and suggestive connections, she shows us that Dryden and his younger friend Joseph Addison (1672-1719) shared stylistic preferences as well as social networks: Addison's essays in the Tatler and the Spectator were to become influential as models and precepts for language use (e.g. Wright Reference Wright, Stein and Wright1994, Reference Wright, Nevalainen and Kahlas-Tarkka1997). The avoidance of preposition stranding by the ‘Bluestocking’ hostess Elizabeth Montagu (c. 1718–1800) reported by Sairio (Reference Sairio2009: 199–200) is particularly tantalizing: Yáñez-Bouza further observes that Montagu was to converse with Scottish rhetoricians and that Montagu would have read some of the incidental criticism in the periodical reviews of the mid-century. Even for readers unconvinced by lists and correlations, the connections between Dryden and the lexicographer and literary author Samuel Johnson (1709-84) seem particularly interesting. In his dictionary, Johnson uses extracts from Dryden to illustrate key terms of style; in his essays, Johnson comments on the word order and harmony of Dryden's style; in at least some of his prose, Johnson avoids stranded prepositions. When grammatical norms were more evident in practice than in precept, how might modern historical linguists reconstruct the attitudes of eighteenth-century writers? Yáñez-Bouza's research reveals no specific ‘smoking guns’, but the importance of style as topic and model is demonstrated dynamically by the inexorable accumulation of trends from the wealth of compelling details in this magisterial monograph.
Her findings are rigorously recapitulated – at the end of each chapter and in the seventh and concluding chapter's answers to the study's main research questions. And for pursuing similar questions further, the author has left her successors with useful aids. The first bibliography describes the contents of her precept corpus, reminding readers that norms and metadiscourse about English grammar can be found in many sources other than English grammar books. The first appendix lists studies that have been done so far. The second appendix describes how to construct a usage corpus from two accessible corpora, the Helsinki Corpus and ARCHER, of which she is one of the project co-ordinators. Indeed, as a co-compiler of the Eighteenth-Century English Grammars (ECEG) database, Yáñez-Bouza has provided the scholarly community with another important resource. And as a collaborator, Yáñez-Bouza is now expanding her range to compile a database of eighteenth-century English phonology (ECEP) and to track the legacy of eighteenth-century grammar norms in twentieth-century school classrooms (APU). The current monograph will remain as one of Cambridge University Press's permanently useful monographs, with its definitive treatment of the topic and its rich bibliographies.
