had publishedSome Thoughts Concerning Educationin 1693, in which he ar-
gued that the goal of education was to prepare the child to achieve future inde-
pendence in the world. This preparation required the development of a logical
mind, but it also entailed controlling the child’s true, unruly nature through
moral instruction. Grammar study was believed helpful in both regards, an
idea with roots in ancient Greece, as already noted. Grammar study was seen
as the foundation for literacy, and literacy allowed students to read literature
rich in moral lessons.
During the 18thcentury, the spread of education and industrialization created
greater socioeconomic mobility, which in turn led to a mingling of people from
different backgrounds that had not been possible for more than 1,000 years. In-
creasing numbers of people from the growing middle class started having regular
contact with the upper class. Although in England both upper-class and mid-
dle-class people spoke the same language, there were noticeable differences in
pronunciation, structure, and vocabulary—what we termdialect—much like the
differences we notice in the United States between speakers from different parts
of the country. Because the upper-class dialects identified one with prestige and
success, mastering the upper-class speech patterns became very desirable, and
notions of grammar became more normative than ever.
The vision of grammar as a normative power was perhaps most strongly ex-
pressed in Bishop Robert Lowth’sA Short Introduction to English Grammar,a
book (first published in 1762) that many scholars believe influenced the teach-
ing of English grammar more than any other. Not surprisingly, Lowth based his
discussion of English grammar on Latin. What distinguished his book, how-
ever, was that he moved beyond the view that grammar study disciplined the
mind; he sought to provide a guide to those who wanted to use correct English.
The problem, as Kapel (1996) noted, is that “rather than basing his grammatical
rules on the usage of the best educated speakers and writers of English, he err-
ingly and foolishly based them on the Latin grammatical system, a system
wholly inappropriate and incapable of dictating usage in a language as
different from Latin as German-based English” (p. 1).
It was Lowth who first claimed that infinitives in English cannot be split and
that sentences cannot end with a preposition. According to Lowth, the follow-
ing sentence is ungrammatical:
- Our 5-year mission wasto boldly gowhere no man had gone before.
The italics identify the part of the sentence that is supposedly problematic.
The phraseto gois an infinitive verb phrase and is separated by the wordboldly.
An infinitive verb phrase in English always is formed by putting the wordtoin
A SHORT HISTORY OF GRAMMAR 11