Language Prescription. Группа авторов
but they do have a set of shared values of consistency, clarity and conciseness. His chapter also shows one of the weaknesses of corpus research – many of the texts in the corpora have been edited, thereby giving the attitudes and practices of copy editors an outsized influence in the published language.
This final section continues the theme of breaking down the binaries associated with prescriptivism. On every level, from linguistic theorists to professional practitioners, the values, attitudes and practices of using and regulating language are complex and intertwined with the identities of language users.
3 Concluding Remarks
Taken together, the four sections of this volume examine a few of the many values involved in evaluating language. Whether through addressing nationalistic tendencies, complex social values and structures, language evaluation within specific communities, the practices of language professionals or the self-reflection of linguists on the role of prescriptivism in the study of language, these chapters offer a wealth of insights into the spectrum between the extremes of binary classifications. This fuller view of the issues in the study of language evaluation provides rich benefits to linguists interested in moving beyond binary studies to a more nuanced understanding of individuals and communities, as well as the driving forces behind linguistic prescription.
More importantly, however, these chapters continue the trend of conducting serious academic conversations about prescriptivism. While this volume offers a range of in-depth examples and studies, it barely scratches the surface of possible studies. With the multiplicity of values that govern linguistic choices on individual, community and national levels, there is a rich area for future research into prescriptivism. Recognizing the inadequacies of binary language opens a rich landscape to examine how and why people throughout the world evaluate and attempt to control language variants. The chapters in this volume provide an important foundation for continued exploration into the complex and fascinating world of linguistic prescriptivism.
References
Calvet, L.-J. (2006) Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
Coupland, N. (2007) Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eckert, P. (2000) Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Edwards, J. (2009) Language and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Joseph, J.E. (2004) Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Percy, C. and Davidson, M.C. (2012) The Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Pillière, L., Andrieu, W., Kerfelec, V. and Lewis, D. (2018) Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2018) English Usage Guides: History, Advice, Attitudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2020) Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English. London: Routledge.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. and Percy, C. (2016) Prescription and Tradition in Language: Establishing Standards across Time and Space. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism: An Untenable Binary
2Is/Ought: Hume’s Guillotine, Linguistics and Standards of Language
John E. Joseph1
Modern linguistics began with Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) modernist intuition that a language is a system of values.2 These values are not self-standing; rather, each is generated by its difference from every other value in the system. They are conceived as semiological values, not moral ones, and we linguists perform our professional identity by asserting a binary distinction between our descriptivism vs a moralistic prescriptivism that, if you display it, keeps ‘you’ from being one of ‘us’. Identity – national, religious, professional – is inherently Saussurean, in that our categories of belonging have meaning for us only as long as we know who we are not (see Joseph, 2004).
Geoffrey Pullum’s characteristically brilliant paper, ‘Ideology, power and linguistic theory’ (2004 [2006]), explains how the gap between descriptivists and prescriptivists has to do with our different understanding of rules, by invoking a distinction introduced by John Searle (1969):
I begin by taking it for granted that there are conditions we might call correctness conditions for natural languages. […] They are constitutive, not regulative. […] Modern descriptive linguists try to figure out from the available evidence the principles that constitute the language being described. […] But of course prescriptive rules are not intended to be constitutive. They are intended to be regulative. English is assumed to be already defined in some other way, or not to need any definition. The prescriptivist’s rules are deliberately making recommendations about the ways in which you are recommended to use it or not to use it. (Pullum, 2004 [2006]: 1)
As an example,
Suppose a linguist states it as a condition that in Standard English an independent declarative clause beginning with a preposed negative adjunct must have a tensed auxiliary before the subject:
(1)a. Never before had I seen such a thing.
b. *Never before I had seen such a thing.
[…] The claim being made is not that speakers of Standard English ought to position subjects of independent clauses before the tensed auxiliaries when there is no preposed negative adjunct, as in the (a) exampl[e]; the claim is that they actually do position them thus. (Pullum, 2004 [2006]: 2)
The worst mistakes prescriptivists make, in Pullum’s view, are when they enforce regulative rules that ignore or even fly in the face of constitutive ones. An example is what his bêtes noires, Strunk and White (1972), say about hopefully in The Elements of Style:
‘Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane’ is nonsense. Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you’ll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven’t said it clearly. (Strunk & White, 1972: 42–43)
But in fact you’ve said it perfectly clearly: no one will take you to mean that you’ll leave in a hopeful frame of mind, unless perversely determined to thwart your communication. Who would do that? Well, a lawyer cross-examining you might, but probably not over the word hopefully.
The prescriptivist error can be understood in terms of the polarization that Bruno Latour has shown to characterize modern thought. Latour (1993 [1991]) argues that modernism, antimodernism and postmodernism are all equally grounded in a ‘Constitution’ that took shape in the 17th century, whereby the natural and the human were separated, then gradually made into irreconcilable opposites. Yet the water between them can never be as clear blue as is imagined. In reality, it is muddied by the fact that we can know Nature only through our human eyes and minds, however much we may hide that fact behind instruments and numbers; neither our eyes and minds nor the instruments we create and the numbers we generate stand somehow outside Nature. They are inside what they aim to observe and explain. And yet, people perceive and explain phenomena differently. Convergence is exceptional in science, and never permanent. The modern Constitution demands, however, that we relegate all this to the endnotes, and then delete the endnotes.
Latour designates the ‘human’ pole as Subject/Society, and offers a narrative of modernism as the proliferation of ‘hybrids’ which mediate between it and Nature. By the early 19th century the Constitution had become impervious to criticism. It denies the existence and even the possibility of such hybrids and is instead committed to ‘purifying’ the split. Yet this artificial split has to be