The rise and fall of sentence-internal capitalization in English

Abstract

This paper addresses an empirically under-researched aspect of English historical orthography: the rise and fall of sentence-internal capitalization of common nouns. Our corpus study supports previous findings with respect to the developmental course of common noun capitalization, i.e., a steady rise until 1750 with a steep decline thereafter. The analysis of contemporary grammars shows that animacy was a key factor in determining the practice of sentence-internal capitalization. Moreover, the grammaticographic advice parallels the development found in actual usage, suggesting that grammarians did not significantly influence its rise or fall. With respect to its decline, we argue that it was mainly a matter of the printers, who introduced lowercase for practical reasons, once sentence-internal capitalization had been extensively used.