In a pilot study on the 19th-century component of the HeidelGram corpus, a list of 100 grammarians' names was used as search terms to identify onomastic references. In 35 out of the 40 grammar books in the subcorpus 2,029 concordance lines were generated after manual elimination of false positives. 

There are very few references to grammars written between 1640 and 1750, but many references to grammarians who wrote their major works in the second half of the 18th century, especially to the so-called prescriptivists Lowth and Murray and to the philosophical grammar of Horne Tooke. Almost all of the references occur in the grammars of the first half of the 19th century. There is a marked change of both the quantity and quality of the types of references around 1850, which can be interpreted as a turn away from “traditional”, especially prescriptivist writing. These later grammarians, based on a decrease in evaluative references, seem to be less concerned with evaluating the work of their predecessors and peers, but seem to focus more strongly on describing language. Simultaneously, a more prominent occupation with contemporary, descriptive, grammarians than before can be observed.

It is claimed that in England the 16th century marks the beginning of English grammar writing. The 16th-century subcorpus of the HeidelGram corpus contains a total of 5 grammar books and about 185.000 tokens.

The network indicates little overlap in who was considered authoritative with regards to language use. Instead, most authors in the corpus seem to have their own ‘clusters’ of influential persons they refer to. Moreover, the Latinate tradition is still dominant, which becomes evident through frequent references to ancient scholars.

The 17th-century component of the HeidelGram corpus spans 17 books and about 590.000 tokens.

The findings indicated that person types referenced in the context of examples were significantly different from those referenced outside of examples. In examples (41% of all onomastic references) most references were made to generic (None) or religious figures, whereas outside of examples (59% of all onomastic references) mostly to poets, literary authors, and political figures were referenced.