HeidelGram – Corpus and Network Analysis of the Discourses of English Grammars from 1550 to 1900

Main Objectives

The HeidelGram project has two interrelated objectives:

1. On the basis of a systematically compiled, representative 10-million-word corpus of historical English grammars published between 1550-1900, the aim is to systematically investigate the discourses of historical English grammar books from 1550 to 1900 with an innovative combination of corpus-linguistic and network-analytic methods. We want to trace if, how, why, and in which subgenres grammarians refer to one another, and which evaluative strategies are used to address the diverse linguistic topics and grammatical concepts over time. Additionally, we aim to analyse and critically assess established assumptions about the interplay between the development of historical English language norms and language usage, as well as historical attitudes to English prescriptivism, descriptivism, and practices of verbal hygiene.
   The representative, XML-annotated 10-million-word corpus of British grammars published between 1550 and 1900 that is currently being compiled and will be made available upon completion includes what is commonly regarded as the major publications of the genre and will cover the first appearance of grammars as part of the codification phase of English (e.g. Sherry 1577, Bullokar 1586), the rise of linguistic prescriptivism in the 18th century (e.g. Lowth 1762, Murray 1795), and its transition into a descriptive tradition in the 19th century (e.g. Sweet 1892/98).
    
2. The innovative combination of corpus-linguistic and network-analytic methods is explored and argued for. In particular, we show that it is a fruitful approach for historical corpus linguistics, and diachronic genre and network studies, which allows us, on the one hand, to scrutinise so far neglected features of grammars, offering for the first time systematic, diachronic analyses of pragma- and sociolinguistic aspects of the genre, and on the other hand, to critically reassess established assumptions on the history of grammar writing from an entirely new, interdisciplinary perspective. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this mixed-methods approach of diachronic corpus linguistics and network analysis in terms of research design, results, and visualisation modes.

The HeidelGram project has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from June 2020 to December 2023.

Team

The HeidelGram project is currently being conducted at the chair of diachronic linguistics at the University of Cologne. The team members are:

Principal Investigator: Prof. Beatrix Busse

Post-Doc.: Dr. Nina Dumrukcic

Doc.: Sophie Du Bois

Student Assistants: Elisa Pizzo, Matteo Schmelzer, Marie Steinbrügge

Previous Team Members: Ingo Kleiber, Kirsten Gather

Previous Student Assistants: Alessia Carrone, Charlotte Lüders, Julia Marcus, Savvas Eleftherios Katsidonis