2. State of the art

The study of premodern linguistic thought has attracted sustained scholarly attention over the past decades, as demonstrated by a growing body of research (e.g. Lepschy Reference Lepschy1990–4; Law Reference Law2003; Burke Reference Burke2004; Considine Reference Considine2008, Reference Considine2017; Swiggers Reference Swiggers2010; Van Hal & Considine Reference Van Hal and Considine2010; Van Hal Reference Van Hal2019a, Reference Van Hal2019b), major collaborative projects (Auroux et al. Reference Auroux, Koerner, Niederehe and Versteegh2000–8; Haßler & Neis Reference Haßler and Neis2009; Tavoni et al. Reference Tavoni, Flood, Lardet, Haßler, Damis-Schäfer and Van Hal2009; see also Damis Reference Damis1988; Waugh et al. Reference Waugh, Monville-Burston and Joseph2023) and specialised research centres devoted to the historiography of language studies.Footnote ² Particularly influential have been initiatives seeking to reconstruct the intellectual landscape of Renaissance and early modern linguistics beyond the boundaries of individual national traditions, responding to a longstanding challenge in the historiography of linguistics. As observed by Vivien Law, while the intellectual history of Europe up to the Renaissance can be approached as a relatively coherent whole, from the seventeenth century onwards linguistic thought becomes increasingly differentiated along national, linguistic and cultural lines. Understanding the development of linguistic ideas in this period therefore requires both attention to local traditions and sensitivity to the exchanges and interactions that connected them (Law Reference Law2003: 1). While the role of English may appear less central than that of French, German, Italian and the Latin–Greek traditions in the history of linguistic thought, early and late modern England witnessed intense engagement with language-related questions in English. The twenty volumes of Alston’s A bibliography of the English language (Reference Alston1974) testify to the ubiquity of linguistic discourse and to the growing production of grammars, dictionaries, language manuals and other texts concerned with language description, analysis and use. Yet the marginal position of English within broader histories of linguistic metalanguage is evident in major reference works and collections devoted to linguistic terminology and metalinguistic discourse (e.g. Colombat & Savelli Reference Colombat and Savelli2001; Orioles, Bombi & Brazzo Reference Orioles, Bombi and Brazzo2012). Likewise, in the International handbook of special-language and terminology research, only one of the three chapters devoted to premodern English focuses specifically on linguistic terminology (Walmsley Reference Walmsley, Hoffmann, Kalverkämper, Wiegand, Galinski and Hüllen1999). Although Walmsley has recently returned to the subject (Reference Walmsley and Coffey2021), a comprehensive account of the forms, functions and development of the English metalanguage of linguistics has rarely been treated as a coherent object of inquiry.

Research on premodern English linguistic thought has been undertaken within several scholarly traditions, spanning fields such as the history of linguistics, ESP/LSP studies, terminology research and intellectual history. Existing scholarship has illuminated important periods (e.g. Aarsleff Reference Aarsleff1967; Salmon Reference Salmon1988), figures (Subbiondo Reference Subbiondo1992) and domains of inquiry, from grammar writing (e.g. Robins Reference Robins and Leitner1986; Dons Reference Dons2004) and lexicography (e.g. Starnes & Noyes Reference Starnes and Noyes1946; Hayashi Reference Hayashi1978; Stein Reference Stein1985; Ogilvie Reference Ogilvie2020), to language teaching (McLelland Reference McLelland2015) and intellectual movements and controversies (Maat Reference Maat2004; Lewis Reference Lewis2007; Beal & Iamartino Reference Beal and Iamartino2016). Developing a coherent perspective is particularly challenging given that before the emergence of comparative philology and linguistics as academic disciplines, linguistic reflection was dispersed across a wide range of texts and fields of inquiry (Van Hal Reference Van Hal2019a), ranging from historiography to medicine to natural philosophy (Rydén Reference Rydén and Kastovsky1994; McConchie Reference McConchie2012; Rodríguez-Álvarez Reference Rodríguez-Álvarez2018).

Understanding the emergence of linguistic knowledge in English requires therefore moving beyond disciplinary, generic and methodological boundaries. In this perspective, the metalanguage of English is treated as a ‘dispersed’ phenomenon that can only be reconstructed through an inclusive approach and through methods capable of tracing terminology, concepts and knowledge practices over time (Andreani & Russo Reference Andreani and Russo2023). Recent years have witnessed significant advances in this direction through the development of specialised corpora, digital editions, bibliographical databases and other research infrastructures devoted to the history of linguistic thought (not only in English). Projects such as the Corpus of English Texts on Language (CETeL), part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich & Crespo Reference Moskowich, Crespo, Pérez-Guerra, González-Álvarez and Alonso2007; www.udc.es/grupos/muste/); the Corpus de textes linguistiques fondamentaux (http://ctlf.ens-lyon.fr/); the Handbuch frühneuzeitlicher Grammatiken (https://diglib.hab.de/ebooks/ed000171/start.htm); the Early Modern English Grammars Archive (EMEGA) (https://clare.dlls.univr.it/gestionale/document/emega); the Repertory of Early Modern Linguistic and Catechetical Tools of America, Asia, and Africa (RELiCTA) database (www.relicta.org); and, more recently, the MetaLing Corpus project, aim to expand the access to primary sources and create more opportunities for the systematic study of linguistic discourse across periods, genres and intellectual traditions. At the same time, work in historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics (Culpeper & Kytö Reference Culpeper and Kytö2010) has demonstrated the value of combining close textual analysis with corpus investigation in order to recover historically situated understandings of language and communication. These developments indicate the value of bringing philological and textual scholarship into dialogue with corpus-based and computational methods (Bryda & Costa Reference Bryda and Costa2023) to bear on questions concerning the conceptualisation of linguistic phenomena. It is within this broader methodological shift that the present special issue is situated.

3. Articles in this issue

The contributions in this issue approach the history of English linguistic metalanguage from different angles, focusing on individual texts, specific concepts and terminology, specific corpora, or the processes of corpus compilation and editorial decision-making. A recurring theme throughout the research brought together in this special issue is the investigation of the metalanguage of English across different domains of discourse, demonstrating the diversity of contexts in which language became an object of reflection and analysis, from grammaticography and educational discourse to historical and dramatic texts. A second parallelism concerns the challenges involved in identifying, collecting and analysing the terminology used to describe linguistic, textual and discursive phenomena. While Marco Bagli, Ellen Roberts, Leida Maria Monaco and Angela Andreani & Vahid Asadi engage directly with questions of terminological analysis and corpus-based investigation, Daniel Russo draws attention to the editorial principles, selection criteria and compilation procedures that shape the creation and use of historical linguistic resources, reminding us that the production of corpora and databases is itself a form of scholarly knowledge-making. A third theme relates to the material and communicative conditions under which linguistic knowledge was produced and circulated. Recognising that the history of linguistic thought cannot be separated from the material and discursive conditions of its production, many of the contributions, highlight the role of diverse text types, social settings and discursive practices in shaping linguistic reflection and in conferring authority on particular discourses as well as ways of using and talking about language. Taken together, the articles illuminate the diverse contexts in which linguistic and textual knowledge were produced and circulated, while they also invite a critical reassessment of the categories through which that knowledge is studied.

Genre emerges as a particularly productive site of inquiry, examined both as a classificatory framework and in terms of the role that genre terminology plays in shaping discourse, textual organisation and scholarly authority. In particular, grammar writing occupies a central place in the contributions of Cristiano Ragni and Marco Bagli, but it emerges also as part of wider questions concerning textual transmission, corpus construction and the organisation of knowledge, as in the articles by Leida Maria Monaco and Ellen Roberts. The studies demonstrate that genre categories are neither stable nor self-evident, and that their functions are not exhausted by literary classification. Rather, genre can also function as an interpretive construct (Ragni, Bagli), and a conceptual (Monaco) and commercial framework (Roberts). Such findings underscore a broader methodological challenge running through the special issue: how can historically situated categories and forms of linguistic awareness be identified, analysed and reconstructed from diverse textual evidence? Different answers to this question are proposed through a series of case studies exploring the metalanguage of English from complementary perspectives.

Cristiano Ragni examines Paul Greaves’ Grammatica Anglicana (1594), a little-studied English grammar written in Latin, as a valuable case study on the challenges of constructing a descriptive model for a vernacular language. Situating Greaves’ work within the wider context of European vernacular grammar writing, the article demonstrates how Latin grammatical traditions both enabled and constrained linguistic reflection. By emphasising the differences between English and Latin, Greaves encouraged readers to conceive of English as a linguistic system in its own right. The study thus offers valuable insights into the cultural and intellectual conditions that shaped the development of English grammatical thought and the production of linguistic knowledge in the early modern period.

Marco Bagli examines the historiography of grammatical description through the treatment of interjections, a category that has long resisted straightforward classification. Drawing on evidence from the Early Modern English Grammars Archive (EMEGA), the article shows how early modern grammarians approached interjections in markedly different ways, reflecting competing conceptions of grammar and language. Because interjections challenge structure-based and sentence-centred conceptions of grammar, their treatment (or exclusion) reveals assumptions underlying individual grammatical traditions and the difficulties faced by early modern grammarians in accounting for communicative and interactional aspects of language. The study demonstrates how problematic categories prompted reflection on the nature of language itself, offering new insights into the conceptualisation of grammar in Early Modern English.

Ellen Roberts examines the classification of dramatic texts and literary ‘kinds’ through an original application of collocation network analysis. The study uncovers the discourse patterns, classical influences and metaphorical associations that informed early modern understandings of genre, while also showing how genre labels functioned commercially to signal recognisable textual categories to readers and buyers. Through its focus on texts, corpora and analytical approaches, Roberts engages directly with broader methodological and theoretical questions that concern the conceptualisation of genre, and demonstrates how corpus-based methods can enrich literary-historical interpretation.

Leida Maria Monaco explores the relationship between genre, gender and the transmission of scientific knowledge in nineteenth-century historical and life-science writing. By applying a multidimensional analysis of the Coruña Corpus, the article demonstrates how metalinguistic strategies vary across genres and audiences, showing that linguistic authority and disciplinary identities are negotiated through specific rhetorical and discursive choices. By comparing how the language of women in scientific prose writing compared with metalinguistic commentary upon it, the study offers a nuanced account of how scientific knowledge was presented, legitimised and adapted. More broadly, the study demonstrates the potential of corpus-based methods for exploring how genre shapes the organisation, transmission and legitimisation of specialised forms of knowledge.

Angela Andreani and Vahid Asadi present the MetaLing Corpus, a new digital resource for the study of linguistic and metalinguistic discourse in Early Modern English. Situated at the intersection of historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and the history of linguistic thought, the corpus provides a foundation for investigating how language was described, analysed and taught before the emergence of linguistics as a distinct discipline. Through two exploratory case studies on spelling variation and educational discourse, the authors test the corpus’ analytical potential while reflecting on the methodological challenges posed by early printed materials, corpus construction and text processing. Their findings suggest that educational discourse constituted an important domain through which linguistic knowledge was transmitted and negotiated, thereby revealing dimensions of metalinguistic reflection that are not immediately apparent from traditional bibliographical classifications.

Finally, Daniel Russo’s contribution examines the role of metadata and annotation in historical text corpora, tracing the development of encoding and documentation practices from early digitisation projects to contemporary machine learning-assisted workflows. Highlighting the intellectual value of standards such as the TEI Guidelines for translating scholarly requirements into interoperable digital formats, the article explores the challenges posed by historical materials, including orthographic variation, OCR errors and data interoperability. Drawing on the MetaLing Corpus as a case study, Russo argues for a minimalist approach to corpus compilation that balances scholarly rigour with accessibility and reusability. In doing so, the article foregrounds metadata and annotation not merely as technical procedures but as forms of knowledge organisation that shape how historical texts are represented, analysed, interpreted and made available for future research.

Methodologically, the articles demonstrate the value of integrating close historical reading with corpus-based and digital approaches, while also highlighting the interpretive role of corpus design, annotation and classification. A recurring finding is that linguistic categories such as grammar, genre and terminology were neither stable nor self-evident, but emerged through processes of negotiation, adaptation and transmission across texts and traditions. Collectively, the contributors to this special issue promote a historically situated understanding of linguistic thought and metalinguistic awareness which challenges linear and disciplinary narratives of linguistic history by revealing the diverse textual, intellectual and material contexts in which linguistic knowledge was produced and circulated.