Joseph Wright: An English Neogrammarian Language Collector

Date

2024-03-01

Author

Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.

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This essay undertakes an overview of the philological work of Joseph Wright (1855-1930), with an emphasis on how and why his linguistic data were gathered (and from where) in the context of late nineteenth-century ideas about dialects, languages, and methods of linguistic research. It shows how his first encounters with work, philology, and publishing reinforced his characteristic bent toward practicality, education, and (mathematical) structured regularity, which molded all his practices and productions. A language-oriented biographical sketch of Wright is followed by descriptions of his several non-dialectological grammar books of older languages, with an emphasis on his linguistic sources. The three dialectological productions, The Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire (1892), the English Dialect Dictionary (1888-1905), and the English Dialect Grammar (1905) are then discussed, again with reference to the language collecting that formed the basis of these works. The concluding comments bring together these parts, reasserting that three significant elements were intertwined and formative of Wright's methods and productions: his early life and its character-formation, his philological training in Germany, and practices of collecting language for the specific purposes of writing and publishing grammars.

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https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85201772254&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111125

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Article