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Prose

Notes seem to pave the way for a great deal of twentieth-century work on speech act theory, ethno
methodology and conversation analysis.
I consulted both works when I began to research prefabricated language (prefabs) in the teaching
of English for Specific Purposes for my Ph.D, hoping to find intellectual precedents for my work.
The layers of irony became more apparent to me as I saw that the latter work could be a primer
for, or a wry comment on, the Lexical Approach to language teaching (Lewis, 1993).
Swift had already drawn attention, through the professor of Lagado Academy, to the importance
of prefabs in building or reconstituting text. He takes up prefabs again in Polite Conversation, this
playful work which was the result of a lifetime of cataloguing examples of linguistic abuse. As
such, it can therefore be viewed as a continuation of the project outlined in Proposal to correct the
English Tongue. He was collecting clichés in order to extirpate them. He describes how he built up
a collection of fashionable sayings over 12 years of field work:
I determined to spend 5 mornings, to dine 4 times, pass three afternoons, and six evenings every
week in the houses of the most polite families ... I always kept a large table-book in my pocket; and
as soon as I left the company I immediately entered the choicest expressions.
He then spent a further 16 years “digesting it into a method”.
Having worked as a corpus linguist, I found Swift’s jovial account of how he accumulated his data
startlingly like the way a corpus is built, discounting his hyperbole in the number of years he
allocated to the research. He talks of the need for a further sixteen years’ investigation. Finally he
sat on his work for a further six or seven years, observing: I have not been able to add above nine
valuable sentences to enrich my collection; from whence I conclude that what remains will amount
only to a trifle.
Nowadays, Swift’s collection of smart chat might contain in the blurb that it was based on the
author’s own corpus which was more than 30 years in the making. There is little doubt that Swift’s
observation that the more observations he made, the fewer new phrases he uncovered will strike
a chord with modern lexicographers using computer corpora or indeed the World Wide Web as
their corpus to uncover neologisms. The author of Polite Conversation, chortling behind one of his
many heteronyms, Simon Wagstaff Esq., may have been imaginatively prefiguring work done
more than 250 years after his death by applied linguists such as Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992),
Lewis (1993), and Willis and Willis (1988, 1998), who recommend using chunks of language rather
than words as the curricular basis of language teaching.

The Spider Gets Webbed
In the final section of my paper I would like to give a brief report on corpus linguistic findings
applied to Swift’s own work. It is only appropriate that this eminent precursor should have been
one of the first authors to be subjected to a major computer corpus study, and Milic (1967: 15), in
one of the earliest book-length computerised analyses of a single writer’s style, claims to have
been impressed by the Professor of Lagado (Gulliver Book III):[the] language frame (so reminiscent
of a computer programmed to ‘generate’ English sentences) struck me as the perception of a man
to whom the mysterious relation between symbol and thing was intuitively clear.
Milic (1990) created a special reference corpus or historical corpus called “The Century of Prose
Corpus” or the Augustan Corpus. Part A consists of samples from the work of twenty major prose
writers of the period. Part B incorporates samples of prose compositions written between 1680 and
1780. This represents the journalists, scholars, men of letters, popular fiction writers, educationalists
and others who produced the typical works against which the noteworthy authors of the period
can be compared. Swift’s use of sentence-initial connectives proved to be one of the most distinctive
features of his prose. I include this table in order to give the reader a taste of the riches of Milic
(1967) and hope I will not be accused of virtuoso sleight of hand or the spurious wiles of a
projector.

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