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Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 159] 2014
► pp. 113–136

“Pained the eye and stunned the ear”

Language ideology and the progressive passive in the nineteenth century

ORCID logo | University of Kiel, Germany

My paper is a close analysis of prescriptive comments on the progressive passive over the course of the nineteenth century, based on my collection of 258 nineteenth-century grammar books. I investigate how the progressive passive was evaluated, which language ideologies were involved, and what the criticism can tell us about the construction (and its users) in return. Linking these comments to corpus studies of the rise of the progressive passive, my paper shows that the extreme salience of this construction (to grammar writers) can be explained by referring to its perceived complexity, its text-type sensitivity, and the social status of its users. The singular status of the progressive passive as the “most hated” construction of English is also compared to other constructions that did not attract the same degree of venomous comments.

Published online: 11 September 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.159.07and
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Hundt, Marianne, Paula Rautionaho & Carolin Strobl
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