Yáñez-Bouza Nuria. Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English: Preposition Placement 1500-1900

Cambridge University Press, 2015. — 373 pages. — (Studies in English Language). — ISBN: 978-1-107-00079-7.The preposition is of particular interest to syntacticians, historians and sociolinguists of English, as its placement within a sentence is influenced by syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints, and by how the 'rules' regarding prepositions have changed over time, as a result of language change, of change in attitudes towards language, and of processes such as standardization. This book investigates preposition placement in the early and late Modern English periods (1500-1900), with a special focus on preposition stranding (The house which I live in) in opposition to pied piping (The house in which I live). Based on a large-scale analysis of precept and usage data, this study reassesses the alleged influence of late eighteenth-century normative works on language usage. It also sheds new light on the origins of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. This study will be of interest to scholars working on syntax and grammar, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.Preposition placement in English
Framework
Methodology
Precept data sources
Usage corpus
Eighteenth-century precept
Attitudes to preposition stranding
Connotations
Prescriptive repertoire
Nineteenth-century context
Concluding remarks
Usage in Early and Late Modern English
Preposition placement and clause type
Diachronic trends
Register variation
Concluding re marks
Grammar, rhetoric and style
The long eighteenth century
The Early Modern English period (1500 –1700 )
Latin and grammatical correctness
An elegant style
The art of rhetoric
Concluding remarks
Latent awareness
John Dryden
Joseph Addison and the Spectator
Elizabeth Montagu
Periodical reviews
Further evidence