ABSTRACT
In recent decades, the study of prescriptivism has greatly benefited from rapid developments in the field of corpus linguistics and the digital humanities, which, crucially, has facilitated access to primary sources. Amongst the diversity of historiographical methods, this chapter describes the design of three historical databases concerning grammars (ECEG), pronouncing dictionaries (ECEP), and usages guides (HUGE). An overview of case studies based on these resources is also provided in order to illustrate their value as tools which allow us to grasp a better understanding of the normative approach in the history of the English language.
