Project Details
Projekt
HeidelGram – Corpus and Network Analysis of the Discourses of English Grammars from 1550 to 1900
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Beatrix Busse
Subject Area
Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
Term
from 2018 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413172483
The HeidelGram project has two interrelated aims: (1) to systematically investigate the discourses of historical English grammar writing from its beginnings in the 1550s up until the onset of the 20th century. This includes tracing quantitatively and qualitatively if, how, why, and in which sub-genres grammarians referred to one another and which linguistic topics, grammatical concepts and linguistic strategies were addressed (over time) by means of which evaluative strategies. Furthermore, we aim to analyse as well as critically assess established assumptions about the interplay between the development of historical English language norms and language usage as well as historical attitudes towards English linguistic prescriptivism, descriptivism and practices of verbal hygiene. (2) to introduce and further argue for the unprecedented combination of diachronic corpus linguistics and network analysis as a fruitful and innovative interdisciplinary methodological approach, which both historical corpus linguistics and diachronic genre and network studies can benefit from. It also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this mixed-methods approach in terms of research design, findings and different means of visualisation.In order to answer these research questions, a representative XML-annotated 10-million-word-corpus of (full texts of) historical English grammars will be compiled, based on prior compilation work (cf. Busse, Gather, Kleiber forthc. a, b). Such a corpus is still a desideratum, despite the fact that historical English grammars are often said to reflect and construe the development of language norms and attitudes in order to affect language use most directly. Our investigations are based on the generation and analysis of three different networks:I. A network of grammars and grammarians, based on annotated authors’ references to other grammarians and their works. This will allow for a systematic investigation of quantitative and qualitative connections among grammar authors, revealing who is referred to in which way and which topics are addressed, including pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects (e.g. politeness, discourse practices) (Busse, Gather, Kleiber forthc. a, b).II. A network of evaluative terms associated with verbal hygiene, i.e. active practices of modifying and evaluating normative language use. This will allow us to not only critically reflect upon the concepts of linguistic prescriptivism and descriptivism, as well as upon related discourses, but also to outline the patterns and practices that may have led to these discursive turns.III. A network of lexemes referring to grammatical phenomena (e.g. parts of speech, tenses) which will enable us to analyse and compare the lexical inventory of grammars, reconstruct the development of fields of study (e.g. morphology, syntax), linguistic structures and terminology, and study genre conventions of English grammars over time.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Netherlands, United Kingdom
