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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
References (76)
Data
ARCHER A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, see Biber et al. (1994)
BNC British National Corpus, see Aston & Burnard ( 1998), available at [URL]
COHA Corpus of Historical American English, see Davies ( 2012), available at [URL]
CONCE Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English, see Kytö et al.( 2006a)
ECCO, Eighteenth Century Collection Online, available at [URL]
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Hundt, Marianne, Paula Rautionaho & Carolin Strobl
2020. Progressive or simple? A corpus-based study of aspect in World Englishes. Corpora 15:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Anderwald, Lieselotte
2017. “Vernacular universals” in nineteenth-century grammar writing. In Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 7], ► pp. 275 ff. DOI logo
Hundt, Marianne
2016. Error, feature, (incipient) change – or something else altogether? On the role of low-frequency deviant patterns for the description of Englishes. In World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G57], ► pp. 37 ff. DOI logo

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