Language Prescription. Группа авторов
grammar assigns a structural description that indicates the manner of its deviation from perfect well-formedness, after which ‘an interpretation can often be imposed by virtue of formal relations to sentences of the generated language’ (Chomsky, 1964: 9). In contrast, with Revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently, the hearer’s mental grammar assigns a structural description indicating that it is perfectly well-formed, and interpretation proceeds automatically. The thick concepts here include deviant obviously, but also well-formed. As for automatically and imposed, which do not have an empirical descriptive basis even on the hearer-response level as well-formed and deviant do, they may qualify as thin evaluative concepts, or at least show that the thick–thin distinction is scalar rather than binary.
Chomsky has revised this in his Minimalist program, where ‘we effectively dispense with the notion of “grammaticality”’ (Ott, 2010: 99), and where, says Chomsky,
‘deviant’ […] is only an informal notion. […E]xpressions that are ‘deviant’ are not only often quite normal but even the best way to express some thought; metaphors, to take a standard example, or such evocative expressions as Veblen’s ‘perform leisure’. […] The only empirical requirement is that SM [Sensorimotor] and C-I [Conceptual-Intentional interface] assign the interpretations that the expression actually has, including many varieties of ‘deviance’. (Chomsky, 2008: 10)11
Fifty years on and deviant is the new normal – but Chomsky still wants to contain it. The scare quotes acknowledge that it is a thick concept, yet that concession acts as a smokescreen, taking away from hearers and readers their freedom to see ‘deviant’ for the thin evaluative concept that it most probably is. He remains no less determined than in 1958 to have the ‘interpretations that the expression actually has’ be assigned rather than individually created. As for what ‘evocative’ may mean to him, I am at a loss even to guess. It appears to be one of those ‘informal’ notions he has just referred to. The Oxford Dictionaries define evocative as ‘Bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind’; does perform leisure evoke memories for Chomsky of his long-ago rejection of it as not English?
Here is a passage from probably the most widely used beginning linguistics textbook ever (Fromkin et al., 2014: 424),12 aimed at showing students why ‘prescriptivism’ is counter-natural, and therefore a ludicrous waste of effort.
| CHILD: | Nobody don’t like me. |
| MOTHER: | No, say ‘Nobody likes me.’ |
| CHILD: | Nobody don’t like me. |
| (dialogue repeated eight times) | |
| MOTHER: | Now, listen carefully, say ‘Nobody likes me.’ |
| CHILD: | Oh, nobody don’t likes me. |
The point is that the child will in his own time say what Mother is telling him to, but right now the child’s mental grammar is at a stage where Mother’s utterance could at best be parroted, not genuinely generated. Mother is being as silly as if she expected the kid to play a violin sonata or solve a calculus problem, and she gets her comeuppance when it turns out that her efforts have made the error even worse. The child is Laurel to Mother’s Hardy.
Such examples are powerful because they are part of our own experiences that we forget until they are pointed out to us, whereupon we can try them out on our own and usually get the same basic result. There are, though, aspects of the example which the textbook passes over, starting with Mother’s linguistic behaviour. It is ‘natural’ for mothers, across species, to ‘groom’ their children – a word that has taken on paedophilic overtones in recent years, but a concept that we cannot do without. Grooming is a genuinely universal practice, and inseparable from all the scaffolding that goes into cognitive and linguistic development. None of the many linguists who have so frequently reproduced this piece of dialogue seems to have cared, by the way, about the traumatizing parenting going on here, quite apart from the prescriptivism: Mother’s response should be ‘Of course you’re liked – I like you’, instead of reinforcing the child’s low self-esteem while showing her love by nitpicking.
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, both diachronically and synchronically.
Language standards and standard languages have remained outside the mainstream of linguists’ interests because of our ongoing faith in a Nature-based science from which value judgements would be excluded. At the same time, standards of language connect to Latour’s polarization: those who value them consider them necessary to the Subject’s rationality and the cohesion of the Social. Cameron (1995), Taylor (1997) and del Valle (2013) are among those who have shown how the discourse of prescriptivism has been linked to the vision of a modern democratic society in which all citizens can participate without linguistic obstacles.
This is quite different from the usual linguist’s take on prescriptivism as a kind of language feudalism, aimed at establishing and maintaining a vertical social hierarchy. This it would indeed be if it were impossible for speakers to learn the language standards that define good and bad usage – in particular, if some physical obstacle prevented this. Such a physical obstacle could be in the brain, where synapses have been so reinforced as to prevent deep re-learning, or in the neuromuscular system – the extended mind – where a lifetime of accumulated ‘muscular knowledge’ resists being undone (see Joseph, 2018). There is no absolute and universal obstacle: some people do change how they speak and learn new languages, even in old age. But many, perhaps most, find it challenging