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and so to catch the first appearance of every word as it came into the
language, and its last appearance before it died out.
(Benzie 1983:91)
 English literature as a recognisable, ordered canon was appearing by dint
of the requirements of the lexicographers. Numerous societies were
engaged in producing accessible editions of previously rare and obscure
books. Furnivall himself founded the Early English Text Society (1864),
the New Shakespeare Society (1873), the Browning Society (1881), the
Wyclif Society (1881) and the Shelley Society (1886). From
lexicographical need there arose an historical account of English literature
which served later as the basis for the development of English studies as
an academic discipline.
The  General Explanations make clear the requirement for the most
exhaustive account of the literature:
The vocabulary of the past times is known to us solely from its
preservation in written records; [and] the extent of our knowledge of it
depends completely upon the completeness of the records, and the
completeness of our acquaintance with them.
(Murray 1888:I, xviii)
This was required not simply for the recording of the vocabulary, but for
the determination of the meaning by illustrative quotation and the tracing
of the word s appearances. The  Preface to volume I explained this
principle:
It was resolved to begin at the beginning, and extract anew typical
quotations for the use of words, from all the great English writers of all
ages, and from all the writers on special subjects whose works might
illustrate the history of words employed in special senses, from all
writers before the sixteenth century, and from as many as possible of
the more important writers of later times.
(ibid.: I, 5)
What we have in these assertions is the gradual clarification of the object
which was to be the focus of the lexicographer s study. It was to be called the
 standard language . Ironically the phrase was not included under the entry
for  standard in the original OED, and appeared only in the 1933
Supplement. The illustrative quotation identified the source of the phrase,
which was the Proposal itself:  As soon as a standard language has been
Science and silence 161
formed, which in England was the case after the Reformation, the
lexicographer is bound to deal with that alone (Proposal 1858:3). This is,
however, an inaccurate manner of expressing the case. For the lexicographers
did not find the  standard language waiting to be recorded; instead they
invented it as a theoretical term in order to satisfy a methodological difficulty.
Bakhtin describes the process in the following way:
Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical
processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of
the centripetal forces in language. A unitary language is not something
given (dan) but it always in essence posited (zadan) and at every moment
of its life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia.
(Bakhtin 1981:270)
 Standard English then was a necessary theoretical invention, organised
by the forces of centripetalisation, and one which produced a form of
monoglossia at the level of writing. Elworthy, in his Dialect of West Somerset,
notes exactly this process:
The education Act has forced the knowledge of the three Rs upon the
population, and thereby an acquaintance in all parts of the country with
the same literary form of English, which it has been the aim and object
of all elementary teachers to make their pupils consider to be the only
correct one. The result is already becoming manifest& . There is one
written language understood by all, while the inhabitants of distant
parts may be quite unintelligible to each other viva voce.
(Elworthy 1876:xIiii)
It is important to note at this point that this is an example of an occasion
when the forces of centripetalisation are acting in a radical rather than a
reactionary way. For what is produced here, a form of monoglossia, clearly
fulfils one of the functions which Bakhtin specifies for it:
it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming& heteroglossia,
imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of
mutual understanding and crystallizing into a real, although still
relative, unity.
(Bakhtin 1981:270)
The emergence of the  standard language is not merely of importance for
the lexicographers, since it is crucial too to the project of introducing mass
literacy, as Elworthy recognises. The existence of a  standard language in
the sense of a common and uniform language of writing throughout the
nation is important. For it should not be forgotten that Tory pamphleteers
162 Science and silence
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attempted to prevent
the spread of literacy by their use of regional uses of written English in
their political pamphlets (Smith 1984:69). This then is an example of the
way in which the use of Bakhtin s terms has to be historicised in order to
give us productive readings of language in history.
The OED required and produced the concept of what Wright called  a
standard literary language (Wright 1924:1). There was, however, another
use of the phrase  standard English , one which started to appear slightly
later than the original, though its roots, as we shall see, lie in an earlier
period. This use referred to something quite distinct. And it was linked in
fact, very clearly, to the attitudes and practices which we considered in the
account of the construction of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth
century. B.Smart, writing significantly in a revised version of the eighteenth-
century elocutionist Walker s Pronouncing Dictionaries, gives us an excellent
example of the continuity of nineteenth-century attitudes with those of the
eighteenth century. Writing on the  principles of remedy for Defects of
Utterance , he specifies the central form of the spoken language:
The dialect then, which we have here in view, is not that which belongs
exclusively to one place, not even to London; for the mere Cockney,
even though tolerably educated, has his peculiarities as well as the mere
Scotchman or Irishman; but the common standard dialect is that in
which all marks of a particular place of birth and residence are lost and
nothing appears to indicate any other habits of intercourse than with
the well-bred and well-informed, wherever they may be found.
(Smart 1836:xl)
The  standard dialect here refers to a particular form of speech which
evidently has specific social importance. What is more, as a corollary of
this, it means that other spoken forms, as they had in the preceding
century, invited social difficulty. Foreigners, Smart asserted, could be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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