Linguistic prescriptivism and the language of the laboring poor: The case of will/shall

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the effect of prescriptivism on a part of society – the labouring poor – that has not received as much attention yet. As education was socially stratified during the Late Modern English period, and elementary compulsory schooling was only introduced in 1870, the labouring poor did not receive schooling or alternative training on a regular basis, if at all. It is therefore particularly interesting to find out whether those who were able to write were aware of grammatical rules. In order to shed light on the question whether the laboring poor showed awareness of grammar rules of shall and will, this article investigates the use of these two modal verbs in a corpus of Late Modern English pauper letters. The study reveals that will was used almost categorically in the second- and third-person singular and plural, while shall is used in 65.6% of instances in the first-person singular. Thus, Late Modern English paupers tend to adhere to the grammar rules found in contemporary normative texts in a similar way to writers of the upper social layers. Additionally, certain social factors, e.g. region or addressee, seem to have had some influence on the usage of shall and will.