Controversies over grammar: Contexts and purposes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

This study examines the controversies that enveloped the teaching and study of grammar during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am principally interested in the contexts in which grammar was intended or thought to function, and to that end I focus on the ancillary materials which frame the systematic grammatical presentations at any one time: prefaces, introductions, forwards, statements of intent, organization of materials, surrounding materials, and manifestos of pedagogy, philosophy, and social or political goals.;In chapter two I show how grammar instruction was informed by such models as innatism, the tabula rasa, and "universal language." Although grammarians agreed that it was possible to devise a single language, they only produced a plurality of proposals, all based on different understandings of incremental competence. I then focus on how Johann Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib develop this model in architectural metaphors.;In chapter three I focus on three changes affecting standardization and what effect they had on grammar pedagogy: the shift from the seventeenth-century use of English grammar to teach Latin, to the eighteenth-century use of Latin models to teach English; the shift of linguistic authority from grammarians in the seventeenth century to lexicographers in the eighteenth; the shift in the curriculum from the trivium to a conflation of disciplines in which rhetoric predominates.;In chapter four I survey the relation of grammar books to the immediate needs of their middle-class audience. I focus on business English skills and training in composition, not to survey pedagogy so much as to reveal the contexts for studying grammar.;In chapter one I survey this scholarship and delineate the changing definitions of "grammar" in the texts of that period.;In chapter five I show how grammar marked the social position of marginal groups. "English for foreigners" imposed a moral and national identity on immigrants. The discussions about women in these grammar books reveals the "moral" limits of what could be taught to women. The middle class, by contrast, generated its own identity by stressing morals and literacy.