Standardisation Processes in England and the German-Speaking Areas

Abstract

Chapters 2–5 were largely concerned with the question of whether eighteenth-century prescriptivism exercised an influence on actual language usage, which I investigated by analysing precept corpora and tracing the development of inflectional subjunctive usage in English and German. By adapting the approach used by Konopka (1996), I was able to show the impact of grammarians’ rules on actual language usage and identify similarities and differences between the accounts of the subjunctive in English and German grammars. We saw that the subjunctive in the two languages is characterised by different kinds of language usage. Several English grammarians associated the inflectional subjunctive with ‘polite’ language usage, which suggests that the subjunctive was more likely to be used in more formal genres and also that it became a social shibboleth. In German, on the other hand, the grammarians make reference to a dialectal subjunctive form that ought to be avoided but appears to have influenced the development of the subjunctive. In English we are therefore dealing with the subjunctive as a polite language marker, whereas it may be described as a dialect marker in German and in particular in Austrian German. These differences between the accounts of the subjunctive in English and German grammars turn out to have affected the development of the inflectional subjunctive in the respective languages. What we were unable to explore within the framework of Konopka’s method was the question of why the subjunctive was associated with different kinds of language usage in the two languages.