Article published in:
Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 159] 2014
► pp. 113–136

“Pained the eye and stunned the ear”

Language ideology and the progressive passive in the nineteenth century

| University of Kiel, Germany
My paper is a close analysis of prescriptive comments on the progressive passive over the course of the nineteenth century, based on my collection of 258 nineteenth-century grammar books. I investigate how the progressive passive was evaluated, which language ideologies were involved, and what the criticism can tell us about the construction (and its users) in return. Linking these comments to corpus studies of the rise of the progressive passive, my paper shows that the extreme salience of this construction (to grammar writers) can be explained by referring to its perceived complexity, its text-type sensitivity, and the social status of its users. The singular status of the progressive passive as the “most hated” construction of English is also compared to other constructions that did not attract the same degree of venomous comments.
Published online: 11 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.159.07and
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Anderwald, Lieselotte
2017.  In Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 7], ► pp. 275 ff. Crossref logo
Hundt, Marianne
2016.  In World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G57], ► pp. 37 ff. Crossref logo
Hundt, Marianne, Paula Rautionaho & Carolin Strobl
2020. Progressive or simple? A corpus-based study of aspect in World Englishes. Corpora 15:1 ► pp. 77 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 february 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Data

Data

ARCHER A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, see Biber et al. (1994)
BNC British National Corpus
, see Aston & Burnard ( 1998), available at <http://​corpus2​.byu​.edu​/bnc>
COHA Corpus of Historical American English
, see Davies ( 2012), available at <http://​corpus2​.byu​.edu​/coha>
CONCE Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English
, see Kytö et al.( 2006a)

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