The Málaga Corpus of English Grammars

This site contains the results of the research project entitled “Linguistic Change, Morphosyntactic Variation and Corpus Compilation for the Study of Late Modern English” (referenced PID2021-126496NB-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. This funding is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

The nineteenth century was the century of prescriptivism as a result of the common awareness of the need for correctness to have access to a higher social scale. This explains the proliferation of grammar books and usage guides throughout the century which, using a normative approach, “taught readers that social advancement through language was in principle within reach of everyone and could be obtained with the help of proper guidance” (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009: 3). The intense rate of publication derived in the creation of a discourse community of grammarians who contributed to the development of homogeneous norms eventually accepted on the grounds of the continuous copying and re-writing of previous sources (Anderwald 2012: 29).

The Málaga Corpus of English Grammars has been then conceived as a primary source for the study of language in Late Modern English and of the effects of prescriptivism on shaping nineteenth-century English. The rationale stems from the need to combine historical grammaticography – the study of historical grammar books of English – with historical corpus linguistics, which Anderwald considered, now a decade ago, as the only means to confirm “with some confidence which features of language were subject to prescriptive influence, and where prescriptivists’ attempt at changing (or preserving) the language had little or no effect” (Anderwald 2014: 1).

The project pursues two objectives: 1) the compilation of a corpus of Late Modern English prescriptive grammars published both in England and in America in the period 1700-1900, offered as the ideal input to investigate the correlation between usage and precept; and 2) the preparation of an online database providing the user with the grammatical information published in these books in the form of an index of grammatical phenomena in a drop-down predictive text, in such a way that the user may view on screen the complete set of references to a particular linguistic structure across all the grammars included in the corpus.