Common topics in eighteenth-century prefaces to English school grammars: An application of the ECEG database

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on an issue which has remained unexplored hitherto:common topics in the prefaces to eighteenth-century English school grammars. Thestudy is based on a corpus of nineteen grammars, retrieved from the Eighteenth-CenturyEnglish Grammars database (ECEG), which fulfilled the following criteria: grammars(i) published as stand-alone books, (ii) written by authors born in the British Isles, and(iii) intended for school use mainly. Our analysis contributes to broaden ourunderstanding of the normative grammatical tradition by showing how these prefacescontain a highly homogeneous set of ideas, beliefs and objectives, while, at the sametime, they show varied trends in their approaches.