My dissertation is the first project to situate the telephone in the context of Britain’s efforts to standardize the English language. I argue for a new understanding of literary modernism as profoundly influenced by advances in telephony and their recruitment for the imperial work of linguistic purification. Using a methodology that combines media theory, sound studies, disability studies, psychoanalytic theory, and gender criticism, I locate in the works of Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf a preoccupation with the fantasy of perfect sound reproduction that is always tethered to the mother tongue and its protocols of enunciation. By examining a range of Victorian and modern technologies from the ear phonautograph to the sound spectrograph, I trace the development of a telephonic literature between 1899 and 1941—a literature concerned with intelligibility, with the accurate registering and reproduction of sound. I recover the phonic subtexts of these works to show how they subject their readers to the sort of “audile training” required of early telephone users, whose practiced hearing and refined speech were needed to overcome the noise of the network. My project ultimately demonstrates how advances in communication engineering, motivated by racialized, gendered, and ableist ideals of linguistic and sonic purity, shaped modernist texts that endeavored to reproduce sighted sound. In doing so, it redefines literary modernism in terms of its ties with imperial media that assisted in the linguistic colonization of British subjects, revealing how the fantasy of a “pure, originary” mother tongue and fears of the degradation of English shaped a modernist aesthetic that negotiated between wanting to eradicate linguistic difference and desiring to embrace the “noise” inherent within all communication.

Passions flare up around the use and “misuse” of prescriptive rules. Where there is variation in language use, language judgment usually follows—attaching value judgment to linguistic variants forms the foundation of prescriptive ideology in English. Prescriptive attitudes prevail among speakers and writers of English, who feel some pressure to use these forms to avoid a negative judgment. This study surveyed American English speakers using Mechanical Turk to determine which types of rules—spelling, syntactic, morphological, and lexical—bother people the most and inspire the harshest judgments when violated. The surveys asked participants to identify a violated prescriptive rule in a sentence, found using the magazine and newspaper registers of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and then to indicate how much they were bothered by the violation. Results indicated that lexical rules separating subtle semantic differences—i.e. farther vs. further, comprise vs. compose—tend to be less bothersome and less recognizable than other types of rules. However, the type of category that a prescriptive rules falls under does not seem to explain why some rules are more bothersome or recognizable than others. It may be possible to generalize by assuming that lexical prescriptive rules will be less important to a general educated American audience than spelling or grammar rules, and that nonstandard dialectal forms will be even more bothersome. However, the ability to generalize these results is limited: there is some evidence for a “pet-peeve” effect. Individuals seem to simply be bothered by different rules, without strong patterns showing some types of rules sharply more important than others. Additionally other prescriptive rules, including those regarding nauseous and dove as the past tense of dive, were more recognizable and bothersome in their prescribed form than their proscribed, providing evidence for semantic shifts.

This thesis investigates the history of preposition stranding in the Modern English period from 1500 to 1900, in close relation with the prescriptive movement in the tradition of English grammatical thought. The aim is to assess, or rather re-assess, thee ffect and effectiveness of the (late) eighteenth-century normative tradition on actual language usage. The methodology lies in the comparison of a precept corpus, i.e.meta-linguistic comments, with a usage corpus, i.e. actual language practice. On the one hand, this study will provide insightful observations into the attitudes towards and conceptualisation of end-placed prepositions in the course of the eighteenth century, the age of prescriptivism. Evidence comes from a self-compiled corpus of observations made on this peculiar usage as gathered from a miscellany of precept works (1700-1800). On the other hand, this thesis will trace the diachronic evolution of the use of preposition stranding before, during and after the age of prescriptivism,as collected in two renowned historical corpora, namely the Early Modern English section of the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus (1500-1710) and the British part of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (1650-1899). The evaluation of the evidence from precept and the evidence from usage will shed new light on (a) the origin of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding (micro-level), and(b) the role of the normative tradition on language variation and change(macro-level). First, contrary to what has been taken for granted in the literature hitherto, I will demonstrate that the proscription against ending sentences with prepositions does not go back directly to the late eighteenth-century heyday of publication of precept works (e.g. Robert Lowth's grammar) but to the mid/late seventeenth-century incipient stages of the prescriptive tradition embraced with ideals of correctness and politeness; especially, to the grammarian and rhetorician Joshua Poole and to the literary writer John Dryden. Language change can thus be observed as early as the early eighteenth century. Secondly, I will provide evidence to show that late eighteenth-century precepts did exert an influence on the use of preposition stranding. The effect is manifest in contemporaneous writings and the effectiveness extends into the early nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it is only a temporary one, as the trends reverse in the late nineteenth century when prescriptivism was fading away. It will be argued that the eighteenth-century normative tradition did not trigger linguistic change but rather reinforced an existing trend.

In English the personal pronouns are morphologically marked for grammatical number, whilst the third-person singular pronouns are also obligatorily marked for gender. As a result, the use of any singular animate antecedent coindexed with a third-person pronoun forces a choice between he and she, whether or not the biological sex of the intended referent is known. This forced choice of gender, and the corresponding lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun where gender is not formally marked, is the primary focus of this thesis. I compare and contrast the use of the two main candidates for epicene status, singular they and generic he, which are found consistently opposed in the wider literature. Using corpus-based methods I analyse current epicene usage in written British English, and investigate which epicene pronouns are given to language-acquiring children in their L1 input. I also consider current prescriptions on epicene usage in grammar texts published post-2000 and investigate whether there is any evidence that language-external factors impact upon epicene choice. The synthesis of my findings with the wider literature on epicene pronouns leads me to the conclusion that, despite the restrictions imposed on the written pronoun paradigm evident in grammatical prescriptivism, singular they is the epicene pronoun of British English.

The function of the semicolon has changed considerably since the 15th century, from primarily indicating the length of a pause, to providing syntactic information. According to prescriptive grammar, the semicolon is used to join independent clauses and to avoid complexity by separating items in a list. Still, there is limited descriptive data on how the semicolon is used, a gap addressed by this study. Based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English, 1,600 semicolons from four different written genres from 1920–2019 were analysed, and their functions were classified. The overall results show that the frequency of semicolons has decreased considerably, most notably in Fiction. It is argued that sentences are becoming shorter and simpler, and that semicolons are primarily associated with more formal genres. Still, from the 1970s, semicolons have been used extensively to separate short segments in lists, especially in printed advertisements. This is possibly the last bastion of the semicolon. Furthermore, the results indicate that the semicolon has been increasingly used in accordance with prescriptive punctuation rules. A possible explanation is that most studied texts were written by professional writers, and that people who doubt their ability to use semicolons simply refrain from using them. Nonetheless, when the semicolon is used in a non-standard way, it is often used in the place of a comma, producing a sentence fragment. Since the colon and the semicolon carry somewhat overlapping functions, further descriptive comparisons of the two could yield important findings. It is also suggested that this research is supplemented by further qualitative studies to capture the rationale behind the use of semicolons in different situations. That could assist educators in explaining punctuation practice to make language users comfortable in using the full potential of punctuation marks.

In Chilean Spanish, second-person address is non-uniform in that the vos competes with the conventional tuteo and a third, mixed form has emerged. To add to this complexity, the form speakers choose has been shown to correspond to socioeconomic strata. Upper classes use tú, lower classes use vos, and young, middle class speakers choose the mixed form in which the verb is conjugated according to the voseo and is used with the pronoun tú. The causes and effects of this second-person schism in Chile are explored here, as well as the resulting sociolinguistic issues and consequences. In a study of printed media, television and interviewed informants, an attempt is made to confirm and validate the complexity of address in Chilean Spanish and determine the degree of the mixed voseo‟s pervasion into the mainstream.

Véritable dogme en droit interne et s’imposant comme un standard dans l’ordre juridique international, le concept d’« État de droit » est dépourvu d’une signification clairement déterminée. Différentes conceptions sont admises et dépendent des acceptions de l’État en question, d’une garantie hic et nunc de certains droits ainsi que d’une volonté politique des gouvernants. L’objet de cette recherche s’attache au droit administratif, précisément au rôle du juge administratif, comme vecteur de soumission de l’autorité de l’État afin de promouvoir les droits et libertés fondamentales des administrés en France. Si rien ne présageait une telle évolution au nom de la raison d’État, le Conseil d’État, par une pensée politique (néo)libérale, s’est imposé comme l’institution juridictionnelle majeure dans la construction du concept d’État de droit administratif. Au moyen d’une interprétation formelle et substantielle du principe de légalité, l’État de droit administratif légitime l’action publique des gouvernants tout en garantissant la sécurité juridique des administrés. Cette liaison de l’État et du droit administratif relève d’une construction inépuisable, appréhendée par l’État de contentieux qui s’analyse comme le kaléidoscope des faits sociaux. Ce dernier résulte d’une politique de la force, d’un conflit positif entre les Hommes, les institutions, les normes ou les pouvoirs institués. Ainsi, en conciliant l’Autorité et la Liberté, le concept d’État de droit administratif révèle le degré d’assujettissement de l’administration au droit administratif. Le développement objectif du concept d’État de droit administratif est bâti par l’État de justice et protégé par l’État légal, au profit d’une justice administrative garante des valeurs républicaines de l’État. Le perfectionnement de l’État de droit administratif par l’État de contentieux est agencé par l’État démocratique et régulé par l’État global, en libérant l’administré de toute servitude de la part de l’administration. L’illibéralisme administratif s’estompe au profit d’une société de(s) droit(s), d’une juridicisation et d’un normativisme absolus, au détriment de l’État. / The Rule of law concept is a real domestic law dogma and has established itself as a norm in the international judicial order. It is beneft of a clearly defined signification. Different concepts are accepted and depend on the agreements of the state, on a hic et nunc warranty of some rights as well as the rulers political will. This study aims to consider the administrative law, and more specifically the administrative judge’s role, as a means of control over the authority of the state so as to promote the rights and fundamental freedoms of the constituents in France. Even if nothing could portend such an evolution on the account of the state, the Conseil d’État, through a (neo)liberal political influence, became major judicial institution which builds the concept of domestic rule. The administrative juridiction legitimizes the public action of the governments while ensuring the legal security of the constituents through a formal and substantive interpretation of the principle of legality. This relation on between the state and the administrative law state of litigation which can be analyzed as a kaleidoscope of social facts. This stems from a power policy, of a positive conflict between men, the institutions, the normes or the instituted powers. Therefore, by accommodating authority and freedom, the administrative jurisdiction exposes the extent to which the administration is subjected to the administrative law. The objective construction of the administrative Rule of law allows the setting up of an administrative justice, which guarantees the republican values of the State thanks to legal Justice and Legal State. The upgrading of the administrative Rule of law by the democracy provide some freedom to the people vis-à-vis the state. The lack of liberalism fades away in favour of a litigious society, juridification and normatism to the detriment of the state.

"Endymion" è il traît d'union tra i juvenilia di Keats ("Poems", 1817) e i suoi lavori più conosciuti ("Lamia, Isabella ... and other Poems"). Per sua natura, è un'opera di transizione e quindi concede allo studioso un punto di vista privilegiato sullo sviluppo della poetica e della lingua di Keats. Inoltre, l'"Endymion" è l'opera keatsiana più aspramente contestata dalla critica romantica. Gli studiosi moderni hanno analizzato il problema alla luce di considerazioni socio-politiche, il mio lavoro mira invece ad un'analisi più strettamente linguistica. Ricostruisco il contesto linguistico del diciottesimo e diciannovesimo secolo al fine di spiegare il disagio dei recensori nei confronti di "Endymion". Sostengo che il prescrittivismo del Settecento nasce da una profonda ansia relativa alla lingua, causata dalle teorie di Locke. L'atteggiamento prescrittivista influenza la critica romantica e i critici di Keats in particolare, più di quanto potessero fare considerazioni di natura politica. Analizzo le peculiarità linguistiche e strutturali di "Endymion" al fine di provare che Keats elabora una 'poetica dell'incontrollabilità', una serie di strategie stilistiche e testuali, che violano le convenzioni linguistiche e narrative e che vengono quindi percepite come destabilizzanti e stranianti. / "Endymion" is the traît d’union between Keats’s juvenilia ("Poems", 1817)and his better known, and, conventionally, ’mature’ works ("Lamia, Is- abella ... and other Poems", 1820). By its nature, it is a transitional work, and thus gives the scholar special insight into the development of Keats’s poetics and idiom. Moreover, "Endymion" is the Keatsian work which most irritated and provoked contemporary critics; the two pieces of venomous invective it received in the periodical press of the time have become the stuff of scholarly legend. Recent scholarly work has analysed the language of "Endymion" in socio-political terms; my work focuses on more strictly linguistic concerns. I reconstruct the linguistic context of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to explain the reviewers’ unease with regard to "Endymion". I maintain that eighteenth-century prescriptivism arose from a deep-seated anxiety regarding language, Lockian in origin, and that the ensuing desire to stabilize and therefore control language informed Romantic criticism in general, and the criticism of Keats’s work in particular, more fundamentally than politics could or did. I analyse the imaginative and linguistic markers of "Endymion" in order to prove that Keats had elaborated a “poetics of uncontrollability”, a series of textual and stylistic strategies, which violated linguistic and narrative standards and were therefore perceived as unsettling.