Attitudes to language in the prescriptive grammars in the Age of Reason

This thesis concerns itself with the formation of the attitudes to language in the course of the standardization of the English language in the eighteenth century. It is the aim of this thesis to show that the rise of the prescriptive grammars was caused by certain ideological presumptions about the nature of language and by certain social processes and that the understanding of the ideological and historical background is crucial for the interpretation of these grammars. The first chapter discusses the proposals for the English academy. It is shown that these proposals presented and propagated the ideas that formed the basis of the prescriptive attitude to language and that they, therefore, represent the essential prelude for the flowering of the prescriptive ideology in the later decades of the eighteenth century. The second chapter deals with the consequences of the effort of the strong rising middle classes for the social selfidentification. It is shown that language played an important role in this process and that the desire of reaching the standard of the upper classes caused an unprecedented demand after the language codification and influenced its shape. In the last chapter, the nature of the norm of the prescriptive grammars is examined and it is argued that it was based on the usage of the upper..