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Part of
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 275–302

“Vernacular universals” in nineteenth-century grammar writing

This article investigates nineteenth-century prescriptive grammar writing for comments on four purported “vernacular universals”: multiple negation, adverbs without -ly, you was, and existential there is/there was with plural subjects. These features were already going out of (written) language use, but were actively stigmatized as faulty, uneducated or socially undesirable by prescriptive grammar writers. However, there are national and individual differences in salience and the degree of stigmatization that still affect the status of these non-standard features today.

Keywords: prescriptivism, grammar writing, nineteenth-century English, non-standard English, stigmatization, morphosyntax, multiple negation, zero adverbs, singular was , existentials
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Collection of Nineteenth-Century Grammars (CNG)
  • 3.Case studies
    • 3.1Multiple negation
    • 3.2Adverbs without -ly
    • 3.3 You was vs. you were
    • 3.4 There is/there was with plural subjects
    • 3.5Epithets
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.11and
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