Writing: Speech tag results · 8:52pm Feb 13th, 2014
I compiled the results you contributed here, and did 5 more books myself from 1720-1826. Here’s a graph of 32 datapoints from 32 books.
There are two trends. One is that types 2, 3, & 4 were hardly used until about 1800, when types 2 & 4 became acceptable. Usage of type 3 trended upward from 1800 on.
When did grammars start saying quoted sentences were sentences? The Wikipedia page "History of English Grammars" lists plenty of grammars to explore:
1745. Ann Fisher (grammarian) A New Grammar.[16]
1762. Robert Lowth: A short introduction to English grammar: with critical notes.[17] [The scanned copy at that link is dated 1799.]
1763. John Ash: Grammatical institutes: or, An easy introduction to Dr. Lowth's English grammar.[18]
1765. William Ward: An Essay on English Grammar.[19]
1766. Samuel Johnson: A dictionary of the English Language...: to which is prefixed, a Grammar of the English Language.[20]
1772. Joseph Priestley: The Rudiments of English Grammar: Adapted to the Use of Schools.[21]
1795. Lindley Murray: English grammar: adapted to the different classes of learners.[22]
1804. Noah Webster: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.[23]
1818. William Cobbett: A Grammar of the English Language, In a Series of Letters.[24]
1850. William Chauncey Fowler: English grammar: The English language in its elements and forms.[25]
1874 Eduard Adolf Maetzner, An English grammar: methodical, analytical, and historical. With a treatise on the orthography, prosody, inflections and syntax of the English tongue, and numerous authorities cited in order of historical development. (English translation of Englische Grammatik (1860–65)).[26]
1892/98. Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical (Part 1: Introduction, Phonology, and Accidence; Part 2: Syntax).[27]
"A Short Introduction to English Grammar" makes no mention that I can find of quotation marks. Neither does Johnson's 1766 grammar.
I don't know what to make of this. I'm surprised that type 3, not type 4, is the most-recent type of speech tag, since it seems intermediate between types 2 and 4. Having now skimmed a bunch of 18th-century novels, I notice that the "said" tag fit in better with 18th-century style, in which characters spoke wordy and grandiose sentences which had no forward momentum at all. There was no danger of "said" slowing down their lugubrious dialogues.
If you love novels, be glad you weren't born in the 18th century. Those people were all religious fanatics.
Raw data (tab-separated):
1605 1885 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote 20 9 1 0 0 0
1720 n/a Daniel Defoe Captain Singleton 25 5 0 0 0 0
1749 N/A Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 15 11 4 0 0 0
1759 late 18th c. Voltaire Candide, ou l'Optimisme 25 0 0 0 0 5
1774 1779 Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther 10 3 11 2 2 2
1782 n/a Fanny Burney Cecilia 20 10 0 0 0 0
1790 n/a Ann Radcliffe A Sicilian Romance 26 4 0 0 0 0
1796 n/a M G Lewis The Monk 9 6 0 0 0 15
1798 n/a Charles Brown Wieland 18 1 1 0 0 10
1818 n/a Mary Shelley Frankenstein 14 8 1 0 1 6
1826 n/a James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans 8 4 10 2 2 4
1833 n/a Edward Bulwer-Lytton Godolphin 14 4 1 1 1 9
1846 n/a Edgar Allan Poe The Cask of Amontillado 13 0 2 0 0 15
1847 n/a Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre 10 4 3 4 0 9
1852 n/a Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin 19 0 1 1 3 6
1868 n/a Louisa May Alcott Little Women 11 9 2 1 1 6
1880 1912 Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov 17 5 1 2 3 2
1884 n/a Mark Twain Adv. of Huck Finn 15 0 0 0 0 15
1887 n/a Arthur Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet 10 0 8 2 1 9
1897 n/a Bram Stoker Dracula 21 3 4 0 1 1
1899 n/a Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness 21 4 0 0 5 0
1930 1965 Vladimir Nabokov The Eye 14 0 12 0 2 2
1938 n/a P.G. Wodehouse Code of the Woosters 0 3 3 0 3 21
1942 1982 Albert Camus L’Étranger 18 8 0 0 4 0
1959 n/a Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz 6 11 0 3 5 5
1961 N/A Joseph Heller Catch-22 19 3 0 2 4 2
1961 n/a Robert Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land 3 1 0 3 7 16
1965 n/a Frank Herbert Dune 7 1 6 0 11 5
1969 n/a Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five 13 1 6 0 1 9
2003 n/a Jhumpa Lahiri The Namesake 15 3 6 1 2 3
I tell my friends i get my daily quota of intellectualism from my little pony fanfic blogs. Actually I don't, becuase they don't care.
Thanks as always for the neat most.
Data! God, I love data! And I'm not alone.
I'm... I'm... in...oh I can't say it! It's too embarrassing! This is... is....so AWESOME!
1830687 dat reference
According to Eats, Shoots &Leaves quotation mark usage became common around the 1740s, which would suggest said grammarians were a bit behind the times, though I don't know THEIR source for such.
Alrighty then. Good to know. Any other trends in prose that you plan on putting into statistics?
1830833 The translations I've seen of Don Quixote all used quotation marks, but a Spanish version I found online uses quotation marks only for phrases or quoted sayings, and indicates speech with a leading em dash. John Milton did not use quotation marks in his 1674 (2nd) edition of Paradise Lost. Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift used quotation marks in the 1720s, and they were the most famous English writers of the 1720s.
1830924
I actually got my hands on a copy. The relevant passage:
How true that is, and what the source of that is, I do not know, so I'm a bit suspicious.
Well, I suppose rather than being a bridge, it was a patch. For example, I know that AugieDog has complained before that there's a passage in Pride and Prejudice that he simply can't follow, because it's six different speakers and more than that many lines of unattributed dialogue. If you're a writer, how do you deal with that without using the unfashionable "said"?
Introducing the type 3 method of tagging! No ugly said, but readers can now keep track of who's talking.
Very intriguing data...
That's the same way we still do it in the 21st century in Middle Europe.
It took me a few fanfics to learn to read your quoted dialogues (they don't exactly teach that stuff in English classes, focusing more on grammar and whatnot). 
This is like ilovep0rtlezor's math autism but with literacy instead, and about as understandable.
Okay, I'm going to wave a red flag here.
Description vs prescription. It's great and all to talk about Bulwer-Lytton's grammar and, in one story, I've tried to mimic PG Wodehouse's punctuation. But how does this serve me today?
How can I keep ruthless editors like Benman, He Who Must Be Obeyed at bay? I shield myself with Strunk & White, but no avail!
Do you realize how much time I've spent fussing over punctuation inside the quotes/punctuation outside the quotes?
I am the only person I know who knows, or cares, about the thrice-damned Oxford comma!
And now you have
declaredsaiddeclared dammit, that it's all kind of fuzzy and hand-wavey and good writers get a pass. Aaaugh! No wonder writers drink!In all seriousness, in one of my stories (Short Cakes, if you must know), I tried to drop out the speech tags. In my mind, it seemed obvious that the point-of-view character was speaking/thinking. But some readers complained about this, finding it confusing. Granted, I switched POV in every chapter of this story, so perhaps this isn't a good test case. However, since then, I've tried to use quotes (or, in thinking phrases, italics) to delimit the character's overt "speech."
1845790 Don't you damn my Oxford comma!
I despise rules that tell me to put punctuation inside quotes that it is not part of. My heuristic is always, "Would this be harder, or easier, for a computer to parse correctly?"
But I didn't say anything about good writers getting a pass. The only solid conclusion is that prescriptive grammar changes over time, which isn't a surprise. The question remains as to whether prescriptive leads or precedes descriptive.
Simple...
...you cannot.
1847447
And so, my tears,
Must dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.