This book deals with the development of a grammar-writing tradition during the Early Modern English period. It will evaluate the grammars on English published in this period with respect to their descriptive adequacy. With Chomsky (1965: 24-27), descriptively adequate grammars are understood to be works that describe the existing linguistic phenomena in an appropriate way and which "give a correct account of the linguistic intuition of the native speaker". Descriptive adequacy thus ranks higher than observational adequacy which merely aims at presenting the observed primary data correctly, and it is a prerequisite for the explanatory adequacy of grammar theories. The historical linguist, however, is faced with the problem of not being able to consult living native speakers to examine their competence and therefore has to rely on text corpora, which implies the neutralization of observational adequacy and descriptive adequacy.
