Language description, prescription and usage in seventeenth-century German

McLelland, Nicola

Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between language prescription and language use in seventeenth-century German, reporting on a corpus investigation of the influence (or otherwise) of the leading grammarian Justus Georg Schottelius (1612–1676) on language usage. Drawing on a variety of corpora – a specially compiled corpus of writings by so-called Sprachhelden and Sprachverderber (cf. Jones 2000), the Bonn Early New High German corpus and the newly available GerManC corpus – the study finds only very limited, but still noteworthy, evidence of influence, including possible evidence of diffusion first to elite writers, then to wider usage.

Citation

McLelland, N. (2014). Language description, prescription and usage in seventeenth-century German. In G. Rutten, R. Vosters, & W. Vandenbussche (Eds.), Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900. A sociolinguistic and comparative perspective. Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.3.11lel

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Sep 14, 2015
• Book Title: Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900. A sociolinguistic and comparative perspective
• ISBN: 9789027200822
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.3.11lel
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1105463
• Publisher URL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/ahs.3.11lel