Language Prescription. Группа авторов
contradictions, far from weakening the Constitution, positioned the moderns as ‘invincible’:
If you criticize them by saying that Nature is a world constructed by human hands, they will show you that it is transcendent, that science is a mere intermediary allowing access to Nature, and that they keep their hands off. If you tell them that we are free and that our destiny is in our own hands, they will tell you that Society is transcendent and its laws infinitely surpass us. (Latour, 1993 [1991]: 37)3
Because we have never practised the absolute separation that is preached, Latour says that we have never been modern. For him the idea of a postmodernism is as absurd as the thought of returning to premodernism. His prescription of a nonmodernism has probably had less impact than his diagnosis of the flaw in our Constitution.
Strunk and White’s mistake, as Pullum sees it, is their failure to understand that language is governed by constitutive rules that are not legislated in the way regulative rules are. Constitutive rules are more fundamental; they have a natural basis. The regulative rules of prescriptivism are the product of Subjects and Society, and must either bow to Nature or appear silly. Note, however, that Pullum is not challenging the Nature vs Subject/Society polarization. He is trying to purify it. The constitutive–regulative distinction perfectly reproduces the Nature vs Subject/Society polarity. From Latour’s perspective, Pullum’s descriptivism is playing the same game as Strunk and White’s prescriptivism, all somewhere within the field of hybrids.
Pullum (2004 [2006]) proposed nine principles underlying prescriptivism, which he aligns with political conservatism:
(1)Nostalgia
(2)Classicism
(3)Authoritarianism
(4)Aestheticism
(5)Coherentism
(6)Logicism
(7)Commonsensism
(8)Functionalism
(9)Asceticism
Véronique Pouillon’s recent re-evaluation of the principles concludes, on the contrary, that ‘the first three can be categorized as conservative, and the other six as reformist’ (Pouillon, 2016: 140). I do not see why the two categories should be mutually exclusive, but all the same, Pouillon exemplifies the current tendency not to see prescriptivism in such a negative light. She represents a more recent direction of travel within linguistics, leaving behind that purifying impulse towards the Nature pole that characterized the field starting from its 19th century aspirations to be a natural science and continuing to Chomsky’s conception of language as a physical organ. The reorientation in the direction of Subject/Society can be seen, for instance, in work over the last decade on the evolution of language, and even within generativism. Sociolinguistics too, which for a long time appeared to treat social categories as quasi-natural, is tending increasingly to adopt the Subject/Society orientation of linguistic anthropologists.
In counterpoint to Pullum’s nine principles, I offer six propositions as to why tempering our anti-prescriptive reflexes would be beneficial to us in resolving various paradoxes into which those reflexes have drawn us.
Proposition 1: Anti-Prescriptivism is based on a False Binarism
This is a theme that runs through a number of the chapters in the present volume. Our favourite flourish when ridiculing grammars and style guides is to show them breaking their own rules. The classic example is Robert Lowth (1710–1787) on preposition stranding – ending a sentence with a preposition – which he notes ‘is an Idiom that our language is strongly inclined to’ (Lowth, 1762: 127–128). But far from breaking his own rule, Lowth is actually being descriptive here (Ayres-Bennett, 2016; Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2011; Yáñez-Bouza, 2015: 214–218): he goes on to say that the idiom ‘prevails in common conversation, and suits very well the familiar style in writing’. But, Lowth adds, ‘the placing of the preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated style’.4
If Lowth is describing how readers or hearers react to the two constructions, is the passage prescriptive or descriptive? Some commentators think the higher value placed on ‘solemn and elevated’ over ‘common and familiar’ means that Lowth is trying to stamp out variation, and that this is the aim of prescriptivism. But they may be imposing their own prejudice onto their interpretation of the passage. In plays and novels of the period, including those aimed at an upper-class audience, the unduly solemn and elevated figure is the butt of ridicule. One needs to suit the style to the occasion.
Consider too the linguist’s term, ‘preposition stranding’, which implies that the preposition belongs before its object. The ‘normal’ structure is the prescribed one; anywhere else and it has been left stranded. Stranding is what Bernard Williams (1985) termed a ‘thick concept’, one that is substantially descriptive while also expressing a specific evaluation. Water is a ‘thin’ descriptive concept, good is a thin evaluative concept, but dogmatic and courageous are thick concepts. Prescriptivists operate with thin evaluative concepts like correct and inelegant, which lead linguists, with our binaristic instincts, to presume that we, as descriptivists, use their exact opposites, namely, thin descriptive concepts. And so we mostly do: fricative, adverb, interrogative and the like are descriptive in the way that water is.5 However, much of our analytical apparatus is ‘thick’ in Williams’ sense. This includes the terms prescriptive and descriptive themselves, of which the Oxford English Dictionary’s two earliest citations in the linguistic context are these, from a Dane and a Czech, as it happens:
1933 O. Jespersen Essent. Eng. Gram. i. 19 Of greater value, however, than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar.
1948 I. Poldauf On Hist. Probl. Eng. Gram. 118 Prescriptivism is the form of authoritarianism characteristic of the English, not Scottish, grammarians of the latter half of the 18th century.
Note the invocation of value and purely by Otto Jespersen (1933), and Ivan Poldauf’s (1948) judgementally loaded equating of prescriptivism with authoritarianism.
It is not easy to get most linguists to accept that the metaphorical connotations of stranding imply a judgement about what is the ‘normal’ position of a preposition. The term preposition itself contains this ‘judgement’ in the pre-, yet this is a simple observation of the fact that English speakers say I did it for them and not I did it them for. The same speakers will usually and quite ‘naturally’ ask Who did you do it for?, unless they have had it beaten into them by prescriptivist teachers that this is wrong precisely because for is a preposition. They are taught that the correct English must be For whom did you do it?, which sounds stilted and artificial to most people, indeed, even to some prescriptivists who nevertheless use this form because it is deemed correct. Linguists have come up with a second thick term, ‘pied-piping’, for sentences such as For whom did you do it? or Ask not for whom the bell tolls; the for has been ‘pied-piped’ from its ‘normal’ position after the verb, where it is placed in deep structure, according to the analysis of John Robert Ross (1967), who coined the term. In Ross’s humorously intended reference, the Pied Piper of Hamelin is the prescriptive grammarian who lures the for out of its natural place. Whether we call for whom the bell tolls pied-piping, or call who the bell tolls for preposition stranding, our largely descriptive term implies an evaluative element, a value judgement about where the for really belongs.
Proposition 2: It is Unclear whether Pure Descriptivism is Possible
The formulation of Hume’s Law, also known as Hume’s Guillotine, was a polarizing moment in modern thought. It concerns how is statements shade into ought ones – how statements that on the surface appear not to make a moral judgement subtly do just that. In his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume (1711–1776) remarks on how an
author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and […] makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. (Hume, 1738–1740: Part I, Section 1)
For