ABSTRACT
When in 1755 Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language, he included a brief examination of the history of the language and a very summary treatment of the English grammar. Among those mother tongue specialists who sought to reform the practices for teaching the English language and who gathered at the Dartmouth Seminar in 1966, for example, the drive for reform was in particular born of a reaction against many sterile practices for teaching about language which were themselves a part of the 'received tradition'. Despite Johnson's dismissal of the claims of English syntax to be taken seriously by authorities such as himself, much of the scholarly activity of his time was in fact devoted to its study, and before the eighteenth century was over, a great deal more would be written on the subject. It was a century in many ways remarkable for the scholarly preoccupations with the English language which it actually generated.
