Descriptive Adequacy of Early Modern English Grammars

The book deals with the development of descriptive models of English grammar writing during the Early Modern English period. For the first time, morphology and syntax as presented in Early Modern English grammars are systematically investigated as a whole. The statements of the contemporary grammarians are compared to hypotheses made in modern descriptions of Early Modern English and, where necessary, checked against the Early Modern English part of the Helsinki Corpus. Thus, a comprehensive overview of the characteristic features of Early Modern English is complemented by conclusions about the descriptive adequacy of Early Modern English grammars. It becomes evident that comments by contemporary authors occasionally reflect the corpus data more adequately than the statements found in modern secondary literature.

This book is useful for (advanced) university students, as well as for scholars of English and grammarians in general.

Ute Dons is affiliated with the Technical University Aachen, Germany.

"Dons's book is an important contribution to early grammatical descriptions of English and provides a wealth of information about Early Modern English grammar. It deserves praise for presenting an analysis, based on the original texts, of the early grammarians' definitions and classification systems of the world classes, the inventory of morphological catgories and distribution patterns and also early syntactical rules of English. In addition, her tables, which give overviews of the grammarians' statement on particular rules, prove very helpful."
In: Anglia 3/2007

"Dons' work contains an impressive amount of detail that has been systematized, analysed and presented in sensible categories and in a very readable format."
Kari E. Haugland in: English Language & Linguistics 2/2006