Between 1700 and 1800 English prose became more polite and less closely tied to speech. A large scale feminisation of literary and other values coincided with the development of a mature print culture; these two historical trends make themselves felt in the evolution of prose. In this book Carey McIntosh explores oral dimensions of written texts not only in writers such as Swift, Defoe and Astell, who have a strong colloquial base, but also in more bookish writers, including Shaftesbury, Johnson and Burke. After 1760, McIntosh argues, prose became more dignified and more self-consciously rhetorical. He examines the new correctness, sponsored by prescriptive grammars and Scottish rhetorics of the third quarter of the century; the new politeness, sponsored by women writers; and standardisation, which by definition encouraged precision and abstractness in language. This book offers support for a hypothesis that these are not only stylistic changes but also major events in the history of the language.

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Almost every English verb, in context, expresses either a state or an action, and the difference between them may be defined by empirical texts that combine syntax and semantics. Applied to passages from Congreve (1700) and Ben Jonson (1609), these tests give strong if not extensive evidence that eighteenth-century prose is more nominal than early seventeenth-century prose: eighteenth-century authors choose to express meaning in terms of stative relations between nouns, rather than in terms of actions or events. This preference may be considered as a matter of literary style, and perhaps also as an episode in the history of the evolution of modern English.