Language Prescription. Группа авторов
moral stance concerning the use of language, signalled first by ‘of a sudden, I am surpriz’d’. The ‘thick’ word imperceptible connotes deception, slipping in its moral judgement like an ace from the card dealer’s sleeve. Hume’s Law is itself an ‘ought’ statement cast in ‘is’ form. He absolves himself by following up with an overt rationale:
For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it […]. (Hume, 1738–1740: Part I, Section 1)
Providing the reason for the moral judgement is the ‘guillotine’ that would cleanly sever is from ought. A question: Is linguistic prescriptivism inherently a form of moral judgement? Anti-prescriptivists say it is, and I would agree. Whether or not it is expressed in a way that overtly castigates rule breakers in moral terms such as ignorant, lax or sinful, any prescribing of a behavioural norm that identifies some action as better or more correct or logical or authentic or normal than another is implicitly ‘moral’. If you choose to dispute that, I will adduce etymological evidence about the word moral in an attempt to make my prescription trump yours. All these count as values, and values are always potentially moral, while prescriptions are inherently so. But being moral does not make them intrinsically illogical or oppressive.
The reverse is also true: moral judgements, and value judgements, are implicitly prescriptive.6 I am not talking about the intent of whoever makes them; that is ultimately indeterminable. If I ask the person directly, I cannot know whether their response is honest, or even if they fully know their own intent. The best I can do is draw inferences based on my own experiences of making value judgements; yet I know that individuals differ. When I call value judgements implicitly prescriptive, I again mean potentially so, in how they are interpreted by those who hear or read them. As Albert Marckwardt pointed out in an article discussing the controversy over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), ‘An accurate description of the language as it is actually used […] will in itself serve prescriptive purposes’ (Marckwardt, 1963: 337–338).
Although linguists have long asserted descriptivism as a foundational value, what linguists mostly describe are socially shared systems. A few speakers are taken as representative of all. Their observed usage is generally reduced to what is normal, with any eccentricities put into a waste bin of performance errors or idiosyncrasies or are otherwise explained away. Here already is has shaded into ought. Even if just one speaker’s language is being described, how was that speaker chosen? Perhaps she is the last surviving speaker, but in that case, she will inevitably be bilingual, and the linguist will have choices to make about how to handle or ignore the other language which she must use most of the time.
With regard to generative linguistics and its ‘ungrammatical’ sentences that native speakers reject as not part of the language at all, here is another OED citation:
1964 Word 20 289 The charge of prescriptivism is also made against Chomsky.7
Surely that charge will not stick, will it? Chomsky has always been adamant that ‘ungrammatical’ for him is not a value judgement, as it is for prescriptivists who apply it to things speakers regularly say and write but authorities frown upon. Has he not for decades waved the flag for children’s ‘infinite linguistic creativity’ in producing and understanding utterances that they have never heard before? Yet listen to him in 1958, in a debate with Anna Granville Hatcher (1905–1978), a corpus linguist avant la lettre:
| Chomsky: | The trouble with using a corpus is that some authors do not write the English language. Veblen, for example, speaks of ‘performing leisure’, and the verb perform cannot take such an object. |
| Hatcher: | I admit it sounds unusual. But I bet that if you studied the verb perform you would find other expressions not too far from this, pointing the way to this. He has gone farther perhaps along a certain road but I do not believe he has created something new. |
| Chomsky: | No. He has broken a law. The verb perform cannot be used with mass-word objects: one can perform a task, but one cannot perform labor. |
| Hatcher: | How do you know, if you don’t use a corpus and have not studied the verb perform? |
| Chomsky: | How do I know? Because I am a native speaker of the English Language. |
| Hill: | I think at this point I would like to strike a blow for liberty. (Hill, 1962: 28–29)8 |
Archibald Hill (1902–1992), who organized the symposium, acknowledges with his last comment that ‘broken a law’ is as prescriptive as it gets. Chomsky would say it is not, because he meant a ‘natural’ law – and while today he might not apply the term law to the valency of a particular lexical item, he would still claim to be describing his native-speaker intuition here. But what about Veblen’s intuition? Or Hatcher’s, who finds it ‘unusual’ but not unacceptable? And it’s not about nativeness: Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) was American born, the son of immigrants who spoke another Germanic language, and so was Chomsky.9
Proposition 3: Prescriptivism Inheres in Use, not Intent
Chomsky’s intent was never prescriptive, but so what? His ungrammatical sentences describe introspective judgements about what is or is not English or Chinese or whatever. Yet the effect is prescriptive, and we generally take the effect of an utterance to matter more than the claimed intent. If I am charged with making a verbal threat and say in my defence that I was only joking, the judge ain’t gonna dismiss the case out of hand.
The classic mantra of descriptivist linguists is that ‘the native speaker cannot err’. This is fine as an axiomatic methodological position, as long as one is prepared to accept variability. Chomsky’s problem in 1958 was his intolerance of grammaticality judgements that did not match his own,10 and not to see, as Hatcher did, how the sentence he was criticizing was evidence of language change. Chomsky might have objected that Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, 29 years before Chomsky himself was born – but that only shows how languages do not change all in one go. That insight was far from unavailable to Chomsky; it was a long-standing tenet of linguistics that had just had an important new updating by John Fischer (1958). Changes in language always set up a choice with implications for speakers who do or do not take up the change – changes that are ‘political’ in the broad sense, since they become indexed for personal value judgements in a way that directly affects the speaker’s rank in the distribution of social capital and power.
Among these are judgements about ‘authenticity’ – who are the real speakers of the language – with all the knock-on effects that idea has for defining the rightful inhabitants of the place. Your intended descriptive analysis may in time serve as information on how people spoke back in 2020 – back when, from the perspective of 2070, say, Edinburgh was really Scots. Your description may get commodified, your data transferred onto tea towels and T-shirts and picked up in the speech of locals who want to perform (pace Chomsky) their localness. That prescriptive function can go on long after you are dead, and you have no control over it. The meaning of prescriptive and descriptive are in the use of your linguistic work – how it is interpreted and applied – rather than in your intention as an analyst, which no one else can know, only infer, in ways that will vary according to their own experience.
Proposition 4: Anti-Prescriptivism is based on an Impoverished View of Language
It implies that language is detached from people, that it is a code for transmitting information, commands, etc. that can be analysed without considering the interpretative freedom exercised by hearers and readers. Both message and speaker are interpreted, the latter indexically. A ‘hermeneiaphobia’ has always characterized linguistics, a fear and loathing of the notion of interpretation at the individual level (see Joseph, 2010). It is accompanied by a desire to contain interpretation, and maybe even control