The commerce of language in the pursuit of politeness in eighteenth‐century England
The commerce of language in the pursuit of politeness in eighteenth‐century England
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十八世纪英国为了追求礼貌而进行的语言贸易
DOI：
10.1080/00138389808599136
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发表时间：
1998
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
S. Fitzmaurice
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
S. Fitzmaurice
这类作品，如果执行得好，一定会为殡葬者带来财富：因为我相信，一本《新英语指南》一定会像《英国贵族爵位》、《男爵爵位》、《种族登记册》、《房屋名单》和其他类似的命名法一样大卖，这些构成了现代图书馆的有用部分。（《世界》，第CII号，1754年12月12日，星期四）《世界》的记者由此得出了他的结论：观察新词、借词和临时词汇进入和离开语言的频率。他可能谈论的是语法的出版，而不是单词书的制作，以判断其社会实用性。在本世纪下半叶，良好而得体的演讲能力似乎越来越能保证社会流动性。对于那些希望凭借对“种族登记册”等社会资源中所含信息的高度熟悉而在社会上崛起的公民来说，这些名字毫无用处，除非它们能够以优雅但更重要的是正确的措辞方式被丢弃和使用。此外，在这个问题上提供必要指导的并不是一本字典，而是新英语语言的语法，因为正如劳斯在他 1762 年的《英语语法简述》中所说，“用单词正确表达我们思想的艺术”就是语法。
A work of this kind, if well executed, cannot fail to make the fortune of the undertaker: for I am convinced that a GUIDE to theNEW-ENGLISH tongue must have as great a sale as the British Peerage, Baronetage, Register of Races, List of the Houses, and other such like nomenclators, which constitute the useful part of the modern library.(The World, Number CII, Thursday December 12, 1754)Thus The World's correspondent concludes his observation of the frequency with which neologisms, loanwords and ephemeral vocabulary enter and depart from the language. He might have been talking about the publication of grammars, rather than the production of word-books, for the judgement of their social usefulness. In the second half of the century, a facility to speak well and appropriately seemed increasingly to guarantee social mobility. For those citizens who aimed to rise in society with the help of an exquisite familiarity with the information held in such social resources as the'Register of Races', the names were useless unless they could be dropped and played with in an elegant, but more importantly, correct turn of phrase. Moreover, it was not a dictionary which would provide the necessary guidance on this matter, but a grammar of the new English tongue, for, as Lowth avers in his 1762 Short Introduction to English Grammar,'the art of rightly expressing our thoughts by words' is grammar.