Onomastic Referencing Strategies in a Corpus of 17th-Century Grammars of English

ICAME45 - University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain, 2024

The 17th century represents an eventful time with regards to language development and instruction. The English language expanded to areas of language use where the classical languages had previously predominated in the late 17th century, which led to increased standardization in language usage (Nevalainen 2006, 42). This and other sociopolitical developments sparked a shift in favor of English being recognized as a separate academic discipline. (Beal 2004, 102). The examination of onomastic references, i.e. name-based references, in the grammatical literature of the 17th century offers a unique perspective on language usage, sociolinguistics, and the cultural nuances embedded in linguistic artifacts of this period.

Such examinations of English grammar writing lie at the core of the HeidelGram project (http://heidelgram.de). Previous studies within the project have investigated linguistic means employed by 16th- and 19th-century grammarians when referring to other persons within their works, ultimately aiming for a full diachronic perspective. Most recently, the types of persons referenced by grammarians of the 17th century have been investigated. The present study further quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes the types of references made by 17th-century grammar authors. This allows us to identify where the authors position themselves in relation to others as well as changing or stable trends in referencing strategies.

The HeidelGram corpus, carefully curated to encompass a representative selection of grammatical works from the 16th to 19th centuries, serves as a valuable source for understanding how name-based references were employed in linguistic instruction at the time. For this study, onomastic references within the 17th-century component of the HeidelGram corpus were systematically extracted and visualized in a citation network (see White 2012) using a custom-built tool based on Python and R. The 17th-century component of the corpus encompasses 17 texts, which add up to about 590.000 tokens. From these texts, a total of 2586 onomastic references were extracted. Each reference to a person was manually analyzed and assigned a reference category. There are six reference categories, which were originally established for the 19th-century grammar data (see Busse et al. 2018, 2019, 2020), such as opinion and quotation. The applicability of this categorization to the 17th-century data will be evaluated via inter-rater reliability measures.

Our previous work on the 16th and 19th century grammar books (Busse et al. 2018, 2019, 2020) has portrayed the potential of utilizing network analysis – a methodological tool for mapping relationships and patterns, as shown in the pilot network text analysis study on a sample of 17th century letters compiled from the Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) (McGillivray and Sangati 2018). The application of network analysis allows us to construct and visualize the intricate connections between onomastic references within the grammar books. By mapping these linguistic networks, we aim to uncover patterns, clusters, and semantic relationships that contribute to a deeper understanding of the language norms and perceptions in 17th-century English. Our predictions are that the 17th century component of the corpus shall include even more direct quotations than the 16th century due to the increased availability of printed books where authors could directly cite another person’s work.

The reference strategies employed by grammarians to reference other authors show us how they position themselves with regards to certain beliefs and paradigms. The study elucidates the sociolinguistic dynamics of the time by revealing patterns in the selection and representation of names within the grammatical discourse. The categorization of onomastic references allows for an exploration of the social, cultural, and historical dimensions embedded in the linguistic fabric of the 17th century.

References

Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in Modern Times. London: Arnold.

Busse, Beatrix, Ingo Kleiber, Nina Dumrukcic, Sophie Du Bois. 2021. “A corpus-based network analysis of 16th-century British grammar writing.” CL2021, Limerick, Ireland, 2021.

Busse, Beatrix, Kirsten Gather, and Ingo Kleiber. 2020. “A Corpus-Based Analysis of Grammarians’ References in 19th-Century British Grammars.” In Variation in Time and Space: Observing the World Through Corpora, edited by Anna Cermakova and Markéta Malá. Diskursmuster - Discourse Patterns 20. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Busse, Beatrix, Kirsten Gather, and Ingo Kleiber. 2019. “Paradigm Shifts in 19th-Century British Grammar Writing: A Network of Texts and Authors.” In Norms and Conventions in the History of English, edited by Birte Bös and Claudia Claridge 347. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Busse, Beatrix, Kirsten Gather, and Ingo Kleiber. 2018. “Assessing the Connections Between English Grammarians of the Nineteenth Century: A Corpus-Based Network Analysis.” In Grammar and Corpora 2016, edited by Eric Fuß, Marek Konopka, Beata Trawiński, and Ulrich H. Waßner, 435–42. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing.

McGillivray, Barbara & Sangati, Federico. (2018). Pilot study for the COST Action “Reassembling the Republic of Letters”: Language-driven network analysis of letters from the Hartlib's Papers.

Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.