Authority in Lowth’s and Priestley’s prefaces to their English grammars
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Date
2012
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The eighteenth century was a crucial period in the process of codification of the English
language and in the history of English grammar writing (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008b).
The need for grammars to provide linguistic guidance to the upper social classes, and to
those who aspired to belong to them, led to an important increase in the output of English
grammars. Since most of the grammar writers were clearly in competition with one another
for a share of the market, they turned the prefaces to their grammars into highly
persuasive instruments that tried to justify the need for that specific grammar. Priestley’s
and Lowth’s grammars epitomized, respectively, the two main trends of grammatical
tradition, namely descriptivism and prescriptivism. Taking a critical discourse analysis
approach, this paper aims to examine how both writers claimed their authority through the
presentation of the different individuals involved in the text, specifically, the author and
any potential readers. We will examine how individuals are depicted both as a centre of
structure and action through Martin’s (1992) identification systems and Halliday’s (2004
[1985]) transitivity structures. Such an approach fits in with Wicker’s (2006: 79) assessment
of prefaces as textual networks of authority in which it is essential to interrogate how
the readers who support and influence the texts are represented and addressed.
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Sponsor
This paper is a contribution to the research project “El paratexto en las gramáticas inglesas
del siglo XVIII: lengua y sociedad”, sponsored by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación,
Gobierno de España.
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Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 47.4 (2012), pp. 97-111