Prescriptivism

11 Key excerpts on "Prescriptivism"

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  Fixing English

  Prescriptivism and Language History

  • Anne Curzan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  To talk about usage rather than grammar usefully reminds us how big the prescriptive umbrella is and requires us to distinguish the kinds of usage questions in play, from whether they target spoken or written language to whether they attempt to legislate on grammatical or stylistic issues. Defining Prescriptivism It is a commonplace in linguistics to state that prescriptive approaches to language set up and aim to enforce what speakers should say or write according to established notions of “good”/ “correct” and “bad”/ “incorrect” language use (often in opposition to innovative developments in usage). As Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum put it in A Student’ s Introduction to English Grammar (2005, 4): “Prescriptive books aim to tell people how they should speak and write – to give advice on how to use the language.” The issue gets fuzzier from there, in terms of exactly what form of the language is being set up as good or correct, in relation to which other uses of language can be deemed bad or incorrect. Is it standard usage? Formal usage? “Educated” usage? Older usage? Socially acceptable usage? The answer is yes. It is all of these, depend- ing on which strand of Prescriptivism is in play. I argue that within the general definition of Prescriptivism there exist four distinct yet interrelated strands:  Standardizing Prescriptivism: rules/judgments that aim to promote and enforce standardization and “standard” usage.  Stylistic Prescriptivism: rules/judgments that aim to differentiate among (often fine) points of style within standard usage.  Restorative Prescriptivism: rules/judgments that aim to restore earlier, but now relatively obsolete, usage and/or turn to older forms to purify usage.  Politically responsive Prescriptivism: rules/judgments that aim to promote inclusive, nondiscriminatory, politically correct, and/or politically expedient usage.

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  English Historical Linguistics. Volume 1

  • Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  VII Standardization 60 Standardization: Prescriptive tradition 1 Introduction 2 Roots of Prescriptivism 3 The development of Prescriptivism 4 Prescriptivism and its instantiation 5 Evolving attitudes toward Prescriptivism among linguists 6 Summary 7 References Abstract Talk of right and wrong in language has a long history, starting with distinctions made by the Greek philosophers between nature and convention, between regularity and irregular-ity, and continuing today in the English-speaking world. With descriptivism and prescrip-tivism tending to be viewed as polar opposites and the linguistics profession committed to the former and critical of the latter, it must be admitted that the very act of codification in dictionaries and grammars, universally recognized as desirable, has prescriptivist conse-quences. Prescriptivist grammarians and lexicographers have claimed legitimacy in logic, clarity, stability, morality, and etymology, all of which have been discounted by critics. More recently, by contrast, prescriptions involving social equality and respect have won endorsements from professional societies of language analysts opposed to prescrip-tivism more generally. Descriptivist analysts, including prominent dictionary publishers, increasingly view attitudes toward usage as part of an expression ’ s description. 1 Introduction Named a book of the year at Britain’s National Book Awards in 2004, Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots & Leaves was followed a few years later by something of an American counterpart, a tale of a trek across the United States by two 30-year olds who, with a crate of erasing and re-writing implements, corrected punctuation and other errors in road signs, grocers’ signs, and the like, and gathered ammunition for The Great Typo Hunt (Deck and Herson 2010). A disposition to correct the language forms used by others is not limited to language critics but extends to professional students of language as well.

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  The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism

  • Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač, Robin Straaijer, Joan C. Beal, Robin Straaijer, Morana Lukač(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A few have provided overviews that solely focus on Prescriptivism, such as Anne Curzan’s Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (Curzan, 2014) and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1019). The most renowned works in the field provide accounts of Prescriptivism in the context of language standardization/language ideology, including James and Lesley Milroy’s Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation (Milroy & Milroy, 2012 [1985]), or investigate it as a social phenomenon, as do Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene (Cameron, 2012 [1995]), Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent (Lippi-Green, 2012), Richard Watts’s Language Myths and the History of English (Watts, 2011) and Lynda Mugglestone’s “Talking Proper”: The Rise of accent as a Social Symbol (Mugglestone, 2007 [1995]). In other languages, the topic of Prescriptivism has been included in monographs and several collections on standardizing attitudes to particular languages have been published recently

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  Language and Nationality

  Social Inferences, Cultural Differences, and Linguistic Misconceptions

  • Pietro Bortone(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The authority and the legitimacy traditionally attributed only to one linguistic code promulgated top-down have been challenged, and academic attention has extended to multiple, subjective judgments of correctness. Linguistics has moved from prescriptive to descriptive and from linguistic absolutism to pluralism. This has been a healthy shift, but our zeal should not lead us to overlook some interesting problems and contradictions. First, linguistics cannot ignore Prescriptivism entirely, because linguistic prescriptions can alter the very objects of linguistic descriptions: the structure, use, and development of languages. The anti-Prescriptivism of modern linguists, by and large, has not changed the stance of the general population, of the media, of academics in other fields, or even of language scholars in some other parts of the Consequences of National Languages 171 world. Normative and judgmental attitudes to language usage, far from being confined to old schoolbooks and conservative commentators, can be found in the average speaker, who voices them unabashedly. And this has an impact on the collective usage. Second, although many linguists sneer at the prescriptivists who urge people to speak in a particular way or in one language rather than another, they take up cudgels for obsolescent languages, decrying emotionally their demise and actively urging their use – an attitude to language that cannot be characterized as merely descriptive. Perhaps, they should just stop being coy about this. It is not surprising that linguists may be dismayed by the disappearance of smaller languages at an unprecedented rate. The existence of many languages enables linguists to ascertain what is synchronically and diachronically possible in the structure of languages, and to draw thence inferences about human cognition in general.

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  Language Ideologies and Media Discourse

  Texts, Practices, Politics

  • Sally Johnson, Tommaso M. Milani(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  PART I STANDARDS AND STANDARDIZATION IN NATIONAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS This page intentionally left blank 17 And what should they know of England who only England know? ( Rudyard Kipling ) 2.1 Introduction Metalinguistic discourse in the media is often referred to as prescriptivist insofar as it appears to be a clear example of the kind of discourse whereby someone tries to tell someone else how to speak or write. Here Prescriptivism is typically contrasted to descriptivism , that is, a ‘scien-tific’ discourse that aims to capture how people actually speak or write. Undoubtedly ‘telling other people how to speak or write’ is a central metapragmatic practice in the context of language ideological debates, and, as such, is a core topic of language ideology research. However, as has often been pointed out (e.g. Cameron 1995; Johnson 2001), the objective definition and delineation of ‘Prescriptivism’, on the one hand, and ‘descriptivism’, on the other, is inherently problematic, not least since each concept is invariably subject to the linguist’s self-perception of her or his own ‘scientific’ task. And although the defini-tional advantage might appear to be on the part of the descriptivist, it is rarely entirely apparent what Prescriptivism is supposed to be and do, let alone how it should be accounted for in (socio-)linguistic terms. That said, one thing remains clear: if language ideology research is to be acknowledged as part of the mainstream of linguistic research, it should similarly aspire to the descriptivist ideal of explaining what it is that people actually say and do when they tell other people how to speak or write. In other words, definitional and methodological precision remain fundamental concerns in language ideology research, not least since they apply to notions and practices that overlap with those employed in other fields of linguistics.

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  Language Prescription

  Values, Ideologies and Identity

  • Don Chapman, Jacob D. Rawlins, Don Chapman, Jacob D. Rawlins(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  Despite these textbook examples of the supposed futility of Prescriptivism, anti-prescriptivists underestimate both the average person’s ability to resist control by linguistic means, and the desire for a degree of regimentation of language. Anti-Prescriptivism has the admirable social-political motive of wanting to ignore or reject how language functions to establish social relations and social coherence. Anti-prescriptivists recoil from recognizing and tacitly endorsing hierarchies where speakers get judged in terms of intelligence, morality, etc. based on how they speak, when this is not something within the speaker’s power to change – a contentious point, to which I shall return. However they are also prone to convincing themselves that utterances, as long as they are grammatical, generate their own interpretation, which is identical with the utterer’s intention, à la Chomsky (1964). That conviction is the basis for Pullum’s insistence that the rules he formulates are purely descriptive. No ifs, ands or buts. Anyone who might take them as prescriptive is engaging in deviance.

  Proposition 5: Anti-Prescriptivism is Bound up with Incuriosity about How Languages are Formed, Changed and Maintained in their Variability

  Linguists are surprisingly ready to accept an idealized view that languages somehow ‘naturally’ coalesce, and incurious about the processes and institutions by which they do so. This is a critique that I have been making since Joseph (1981, 1987), and it is heartening to see a growing number of linguists doing excellent research into documentary sources that reveal details about how particular languages were standardized in printing, in legal chanceries and especially in educational institutions (see, for example, Curzan, 2014; Hickey, 2012; Percy & Davidson, 2012; Rutten, 2016; Rutten et al. , 2014; Tieken-Boon van Ostade & Percy, 2016). But all of us are well aware that ours is still a minority interest within the field.

  The mainstream view is embodied in Pullum’s use of ‘constitutive’ and ‘regulative’ rules. He never brings up the status of the constitutive rules, how they come about, spread, change or are maintained. Most of the time we let ourselves imagine that the needs of ‘communication’ somehow keep variability in check, when the history of every language for which there is documentation suggests that deliberate interventions have gone into making them what they are and are not. Languages, like nations, are ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983), whose coherence has to be invented and then constantly maintained. A key component of this process is forgetting that they were invented, so that they instead appear primordial and natural. Prescription is the ongoing trace of these interventionist processes. We have much to learn from examining the continuity between standard language and language tout court

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  Authority in Language

  Investigating Standard English

  • James Milroy, Lesley Milroy(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 SOME PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF Prescriptivism Educational issues and language assessment procedures

  8.1 Introduction

  Throughout this book, we have considered linguistic Prescriptivism from two perspectives. First, we have looked at popular and general notions of correctness in language in relation to known facts about linguistic structure and use. Second, practical questions have been discussed as they emerged, particularly questions of interest to educators. Generally, we have argued that objective and disinterested discussion of important practical issues connected with ‘correctness’ (such as the problems of non-standard speakers in the educational system) has been rare, with the result that language teaching and assessment procedures are often less effi cient than they might otherwise be.

  We now consider in a little more detail two practical matters related to language teaching and assessment, areas of activity where an objective and informed approach to the facts of language structure and language use would seem to be especially important. The fi rst is the extensive debate which has been particularly prominent in the British press over the last ten years on the nature of the English language curriculum. The second is the manner in which language tests are used to measure, for various purposes, the linguistic abilities of an individual. This latter discussion is not confi ned to Britain, nor to educational contexts.

  8.2 Press, politicians and the great grammar debate

  Like most other contemporary states, Britain has a majority of non-standard speakers in the school population. Even within such a relatively small area as the European Community, some governments have responded to the democratisation of education with more enthusiasm than others, as is evident from the widely diff ering perspectives on education of non-standard dialect speakers described by Cheshire et al

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  The Subjunctive in the Age of Prescriptivism

  English and German Developments During the Eighteenth Century

  • A. Auer, Kenneth A. Loparo, Charles Jones, Charles Jones(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Introduction 5 actually changed usage. After all, the publication of grammars, dictio- naries and prescriptive manuals only indicates the strong interest in the standardisation of the language. Studies in English historical linguis- tics that deal with the question of Prescriptivism and its influence on actual language usage can be divided into two types of studies, namely (1) those that investigate the influence of language authorities, which could have emerged from grammar books or via specific people, on indi- viduals and their idiolects 6 (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1987, 1991, 1994, 2006; Susan Fitzmaurice, 2000, 2003 [formerly Wright, 1994]; Percy, 1996; Auer and Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2007; Sairio, 2008) and (2) those that focus on the prescriptivists’ effects on language usage on a larger scale and for this purpose employ electronic corpora (cf. Auer and González-Díaz, 2005; Auer, 2006; Yáñez-Bouza, 2006, 2007). 7 Note that the latter kinds of studies (on a macro level) have only recently started. In German historical linguistics opinions on whether prescriptivists had any influence on actual language usage have been divided. Claims that prescriptivists’ rules had an effect on language usage have been made in several linguistic histories of German, but the lack of empir- ical evidence suggests that these claims are mere suppositions (see Bergmann, 1982, pp. 270–272). Bergmann 8 (1982) and Schmidt-Wilpert (1985), who discussed the problem extensively, argue that the matter is not yet resolved. Schmidt-Wilpert claims that not enough is known about the effect of Prescriptivism on language usage, which can be put down to the fact that linguists have focussed on other research areas such as language change and continuity (see Schmidt-Wilpert, 1985, p. 1557).

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  Standardising English

  Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language

  • Linda Pillière, Wilfrid Andrieu, Valérie Kerfelec, Diana Lewis(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, prescriptive argumentation was not limited to the search for iso- morphism between language and thought: when studied closely, prescriptive recommendations reveal an interest in neoclassical precepts; for example: clas- sical unities; a reliance on analogies, which manifests a growing awareness of the systemic nature of language; recourse to etymology; and so on. Studying the prescriptive tradition in a broad sociocultural context with a view to tracing different sources of normative reasoning in their interrelation offers a promising line of further research. A cross-cultural approach to prescriptive traditions in different European countries may also yield interesting results, revealing both affinities and culturally specific tendencies in normative argumentation. REFERENCES Aitchison, J. (1981). Language Change, Progress or Decay? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bacon F. (1620). The New Organon. Reprint 2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beal, J. C. (2007). John Walker: Prescriptivist or linguistic innovator? In M. Dossena and C. Jones, eds., Insights into Late Modern English, 2nd edn, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 83–106. Beal, J. C. (2008). ‘Shamed by your English?’ The market value of a ‘good pronuncia- tion. In J. C. Beal, C. Nicer and M. Sturiale, eds., Perspectives on Prescriptivism, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 21–40. Beal, J. C., Nicer, C. and Sterile, M., eds. (2008). Perspectives on Prescriptives, Bern: Peter Lang. Beattie, J. (1787). Scoticisms, arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing, Edinburgh: William Creech and T. Cadell. Beattie, J. (1788). The Theory of Language, London: A. Strandon. Berkeley, G. A. (1710). Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Dublin: Aaron Rhames, Jeremy Pepyat.

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  Language and Human Nature

  • Mark Halpern(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  should turn out, no one can say with any authority; and since there is no natural course with which to interfere, there is nothing that can properly be called an interference; ‘interferences’ are simply what linguistic scientists call those events of linguistic history that they cannot accept.

  The title ‘descriptivist’ raises a problem that has been often noted, but to which the people who so describe themselves have never offered a reasoned reply: descriptivists, as their name indicates, profess simply to be describing the language and the various forces acting upon it, and Prescriptivism is one of those forces — so why is it, and it alone, to be disallowed? The practitioners of linguistic science cannot reasonably quarrel with prescriptivists any more than they do with ghetto youths; like those youths, we are their data. The explanation of this anomaly is that linguists are in the grip of a delusion: they think, as aspirants to the title of ‘scientist’ must, that they are investigating a branch of nature rather than an artifact. Given this false premise, it follows that prescriptivists, in trying to guide language usage, are interfering with a phenomenon under scientific investigation, just as someone secretly slipping peanuts to laboratory chimps would be compromising an investigation into their metabolism.

  It is instructive to observe that those who pride themselves on being pure descriptivists, standing neutral above all usage battles, recording the facts they find without bias, and searching for the laws of linguistic nature, should take issue with the prescriptivists when they do so with no one else. Why do the grossest offenses against cultivated speech or writing arouse in the linguists no emotion, but only scientific interest, when other linguistic phenomena — the strictures of a John Simon, for example — arouse their passions to the point where even so civilized a man as Nunberg sounds as if he’d like to have Simon whipped? Nunberg’s view, I think, is this (what follows are my words, not his):

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  Correct English

  Reality or Myth?

  • Geoffrey Marnell(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Burdock Books

    (Publisher)

  Were it not for the contribution of Chomsky’s “pragmatic considerations”, universalists would have difficulty accounting for the contemporary and historical variations in a language: current American English differs from current British English, which differs from Elizabethan English, and so on. For Chomsky the surface features of a language are not innate and thus cannot be universal. Yet it is the surface features of English—such as the placement of apostrophes and the unity of infinitives—that mostly worry prescriptivists.

  Chomsky makes a further distinction between competence —being able to express ourselves according to biological determinants—and performance : being able to use our innately-guided language well (Chomsky 2006, p. 102). This distinction is another barrier to any attempt to justify Prescriptivism by the existence of universal grammar. Universal grammar is concerned with competence; Prescriptivism is concerned with performance. So long as one has normal brain and body function, one will develop language competence, but that’s as far as biology and psychology goes. The way we use our language is instead culturally determined. Useful parallels are not hard to find. Take the human eye. It can only discern colour differences to a limited degree. That is a universal structural limitation on human perception. But that in no way limits visual artists to any particular style  of painting or any particular palette of colours. Pointillism, for instance, cannot be dismissed as non-art because (let us imagine) it breaks some universal law about human perception. Or consider music. If we assume—erroneously—that all music is limited to the eleven semitones of the chromatic scale in each octave, does that in any way place boundaries on the style  of music that can be composed? Stravinsky used the same chromatic scales as Bach, but the musical styles of these two undeniably great composers are quite unlike.

  To sum up: universal grammar does not bolster the case for Prescriptivism. Even if there are biological and psychological limitations to language capacity, the way we use that capacity is up to us. There is freedom within determinism.

  Etymological purity should be preserved

  To many prescriptivists, the spelling of a word should reflect its ancestry. For them it is wrong  for a spelling not to, and some crusty old favourites—such as H. W. Fowler or the Oxford English Dictionary —are wheeled out in support of this view. An example is the argument against the -ise  spellings of words like authorise and colonise . The following quote from the Oxford English Dictionary

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