Samuel Johnson's Dictionary has long been regarded as an epoch-making book, as great a scholarly achievement as the dictionaries of the Italian, French and Spanish academies, yet more enlightened in its pretensions and its politics. For Johnson does not claim to have fixed the language; his authority is not backed by the state; his decisions as to currency, propriety, meaning, and spelling are based on a jumble of general custom, literary precedent, and reason. / I argue that the intellectual origins of Johnsonian standard English lie in Sir Edward Coke's early seventeenth-century restatement of common law doctrine and terms. Salient issues are common law's need to give an account of its antiquated, medieval vocabulary and its place in the constitutional conflict of the seventeenth century. I give an account of other possible influences on Johnson--Latin and English grammars, pedagogy, philosophical speculation on the nature of language, English prose styles, and proposals for an English academy or similar reform--but cannot find in any of them a sufficiently close conceptual parallel.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.23738 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Stone, John, 1967- |
| Contributors | Hensley, David C. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001500201, proquestno: MM12091, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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