De Gruyter Mouton The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought: 4 (Language and Social Processes [LSP], 4)

The volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology.