Language Prescription. Группа авторов
esteemed colleague Geoffrey Pullum. The prescription given by Galen of Pergamon in his treatise On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Passions of the Mind is to find a friend honest enough to speak the truth about the excesses one needs to overcome. I am fortunate to have Geoff as such a friend and mentor.
(2)On Saussure and modernism, see Joseph (2017a), and for an overview of Saussure, see Joseph (2012).
(3)Original (Latour, 1991: 57): ‘Si vous les critiquez en disant que la nature est un monde construit de mains d’homme, ils vous montreront qu’elle est transcendante et qu’ils n’y touchent pas. Si vous leur dites que la société est transcendante et que ses lois nous dépasse infiniment, ils vous diront que nous sommes libres et que notre destin est entre nos seules mains.’ Porter’s translation reverses the clauses in the second sentence.
(4)For a fuller view of Lowth and prescriptivism, see also Pullum (1974) and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2011).
(5)This is not to say that every linguist will agree on the precise definition of fricative, just as water ‘in every cultural context […] is densely encoded with social, spiritual, political and environmental meanings’ (Strang, 2004). Thin descriptive – thick – thin evaluative form a continuum of application in use of terms that helps us to understand what we do with them. They should not be taken as defining characteristics of terms, since this would leave them vulnerable to sceptical or phenomenological questions as to whether any ‘pure’ description is possible: see Proposition 2.
(6)In parallel, we may expect that descriptions are value neutral. Yet Hume himself has shown us how deceptive this is: how descriptions do in fact contain value judgements. Whether there can be value-free description is not a problem he takes up: his concern is simply that it is dishonest to disguise moral judgements as pure description. Actually, where ought is concerned, he ignores the deontic vs epistemic distinction – You ought to be nicer to Mary vs It ought to be nicer tomorrow. The latter contains a value judgement about weather, but no moral judgement, since it is not about behavioural norms.
(7)The sentence is from a book review (Sobelman, 1964) in which Chomsky is being criticized for using made-up sentences as data. The passage continues: ‘It is quite true that the sample English sentences generated by Chomsky sometimes have little resemblance to real English, and we can say, therefore, that Chomsky has erroneously attributed some sentences of Prescribed English to English proper.’
(8)On this passage, see also Boden (2008: 1955) and Sampson and Babarczy (2014: 82–84). Chomsky’s reference is to Veblen (1899).
(9)Veblen was born in Wisconsin to native Norwegian-speaking parents, but English was spoken in the home by his parents with his three elder and 10 younger siblings, and he started school in English at five. Chomsky’s parents were Yiddish speakers living in a mainly Yiddish language community, and young Noam did not have older siblings to help give him a head start in English. Hatcher was born in Baltimore, MD, where Chomsky’s parents married and lived before moving to Philadelphia, PA, and Hill was born in New York City.
(10)Before perform leisure, Veblen (1899) refers to ‘The performance of productive work’ and ‘the performance of labour’, with mass noun objects, but these do not seem to have caught Chomsky’s eye as ‘the performance of leisure’ did; so he may have taken as a syntactic incongruity what was in fact a personal reaction to a particular lexical collocation.
(11)I thank my colleague Rob Truswell for drawing my attention to this passage.
(12)The data come originally from McNeill (1966: 69). No age is given for the child.
(13)These are the terms used by Gibson (1760), on which see further Chapter 5 of Joseph (2006).
(14)The four-tone system of Mandarin is generally represented in Roman transcription with an accent mark over the vowel, and the nine-tone system of Cantonese with the number of the tone in superscript at the end of the word.
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