Founding Grammars

How Early America's War Over Words Shaped Today's Language

Rosemarie Ostler

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781466846289
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A "lively and revealing" history of America's obsession with grammar—from the debate over double negatives to the influence of frontier vernacular ( Kirkus Reviews ). Standard grammar and accurate spelling are widely considered hallmarks of a good education, but their exact definitions are much more contentious—capable of inciting a full-blown grammar war at the splice of a comma. With an accessible and enthusiastic approach, Ostler considers these grammatical shibboleths, tracing current debates back to America's earliest days, an era when most families owned only two books—the Bible and a grammar primer. Along the way, she investigates colorful historical characters on both sides of the grammar debate in her efforts to unmask the origins of contemporary speech. Linguistic founding fathers like Noah Webster, Tory expatriate Lindley Murray, and post-Civil War literary critic Richard Grant White, all play a featured role in creating the rules we've come to use, and occasionally discard, throughout the years. Founding Grammars is for curious readers who want to know where grammar rules have come from, where they've been, and where they might go next.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Grammar for a New Country
• 2. Grammar for Different Classes of Learners
• 3. The Value of Grammar
• 4. Rational Grammar
• 5. Grammar and Gentility
• 6. The Science of Grammar
• 7. Grammar for a New Century
• 8. The Persistence of Grammar
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Rosemarie Ostler
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright