Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identity 9781788928380

Citation preview

Language Prescription

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Series Editors: John Edwards, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada and Dalhousie University, Canada and Leigh Oakes, Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Multilingual Matters series publishes books on bilingualism, bilingual education, immersion education, second language learning, language policy and multiculturalism. The editor is particularly interested in ‘macro’ level studies of language policies, language maintenance, language shift, language revival and language planning. Books in the series discuss the relationship between language in a broad sense and larger cultural issues, particularly identity-related ones. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS: 170

Language Prescription Values, Ideologies and Identity Edited by

Don Chapman and Jacob D. Rawlins

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/CHAPMA8373 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Chapman, Don - editor. | Rawlins, Jacob D., editor. Title: Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identities/Edited by Don Chapman and Jacob D. Rawlins. Description: Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, 2020. | Series: Multilingual  Matters: 170 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book is a detailed examination of social connections to language evaluation with a specific focus on the values associated with both prescriptivism and descriptivism. The chapters, written by authors from many different linguistic and national backgrounds, use a variety of approaches and methods to discuss values in linguistic prescriptivism” — Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019054094 (print) | LCCN 2019054095 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788928373 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788928380 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788928397 (epub) | ISBN 9781788928403 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Language awareness. | Language and languages—Evaluation. | Language and languages—Study and teaching. Classification: LCC P53.454 .V35 2020 (print) | LCC P53.454 (ebook) | DDC 418—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054094 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054095 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-837-3 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2020 Don Chapman, Jacob D. Rawlins and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India.

Contents

Contributors 1

vii

Introduction: Values and Binaries in Language Evaluation Jacob D. Rawlins and Don Chapman

1

Part 1: Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism: An Untenable Binary 2

3

4

Is/Ought: Hume’s Guillotine, Linguistics and Standards of Language John E. Joseph

15

Inferring Prescriptivism: Considerations Inspired by Hobongan and Minority Language Documentation Marla Perkins

32

Are You a Descriptivist or a Prescriptivist? The Meaning of the Term Descriptivism and the Values of Those Who Use It Don Chapman

46

Part 2: Prescriptivism vs Linguistics: An Unnecessary Binary 5

6

7

8

The Linguistic Value of Investigating Historical Prescriptivism Lieselotte Anderwald

73

Examining the Split Infi nitive: Prescriptivism as a Constraint in Language Variation and Change Viktorija Kostadinova

95

Language Should Be Pure and Grammatical: Values in Prescriptivism in the Netherlands 1917–2016 Marten van der Meulen

121

Maintaining Power through Language Correction: A Case of L1 Education in Post-Soviet Lithuania Loreta Vaicekauskienė

145

v

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Part 3: Responding to Correctness: Personal Values and Identity 9

‘Good Guys’ vs ‘Bad Guys’: Constructing Linguistic Identities on the Basis of Usage Problems Carmen Ebner

10 What Do ‘Little Aussie Sticklers’ Value Most? Alyssa A. Severin and Kate Burridge

173 194

11 Grammar Next to Godliness: Prescriptivism and the Tower of Babel Nola Stephens-Hecker

212

12 Linguistic Cleanliness is Next to Godliness – But Not for Conservative Anabaptists Kate Burridge

231

Part 4: Judging Correctness: Practitioner Values and Variation 13 Fowler’s Values: Ideology and A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) Giuliana Russo

251

14 US Copy Editors, Style Guides and Usage Guides and their Impact on British Novels Linda Pillière

264

15 Practicing Prescriptivism: How Copy Editors Treat Prescriptive Rules Jonathon Owen

292

Index

307

Contributors

Editors

Don Chapman is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at Brigham Young University, USA. His research focuses on the history of the English language, prescriptivism, and occasionally the intersection of those two topics. Don has published several articles on prescriptivism, ranging from an analysis of 18th century grammarians as ‘language experts’ to the indexical use of proscribed forms in political debates. Jacob D. Rawlins is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at Brigham Young University, USA. His research focuses on the editing and publishing profession, interactive data displays and applied rhetorical theory. Jacob has published in Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, Technical Communication Quarterly, enculturation and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. He serves as an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Business Communication. Contributors

Lieselotte Anderwald is Full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Kiel, Germany. Her main research interests are variation in the English language, corpus linguistics and the effects of prescriptivism on language change. She is the author of three monographs, Negation in Non-Standard British English: Gaps, Regularizations and Asymmetries (Routledge, 2002), The Morphology of English Dialects: Verb-Formation in Non-Standard English (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Language between Description and Prescription: Verb Categories in Nineteenth-Century Grammars of English (Oxford University Press, 2016), as well as a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals and collected volumes. Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University, Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has authored/edited more than 20 books on different aspects of language, is a regular presenter of language segments on radio and has given a TED Talk on euphemism and taboo. vii

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Carmen Ebner is a sociolinguist researching language variation and change in British English. In her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Proper English usage: A sociolinguistic investigation of usage problems in British English’, Carmen investigated attitudes of the general public, linguists and usage guide authors towards stigmatised language features such as literally as an intensifier, dangling participles and like as an approximative adverb. Her research interests also involve language ideologies, historical linguistics and linguistic discrimination. Carmen is currently a Projects Assistant at Cambridge Assessment English, a research-only department of the University of Cambridge. John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His books include Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages (Blackwell, 1987), Limiting the Arbitrary: Naturalism and its Opposites in Plato’s Cratylus and Modern Theories of Language (John Benjamins, 2000), From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2002), Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Language and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), Saussure (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History (Cambridge University Press, 2018). John has recently translated Émile Benveniste’s Last Lectures: Collège de France, 1968 and 1969 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Viktorija Kostadinova is Lecturer in English Sociolinguistics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she has been teaching since 2017. Previously, she worked at Leiden University, where she obtained her PhD in 2018, with a thesis on language prescriptivism and its effects on language use and speakers in the context of American English. Viktorija holds two MA degrees from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in English linguistics and literature (2011) and in cultural studies (2013). Jonathon Owen is a copy editor at Brigham Young University, where he also obtained degrees in English language and linguistics. His Master’s thesis examined the types of changes that copy editors make and their effect on standard English usage, and he has written about grammar and usage for Grammar Girl, Visual Thesaurus and Copyediting newsletter. Jonathon also blogs about usage, editing and linguistics at Arrant Pedantry (www.arrantpedantry.com). Marla Perkins is a linguist, logician and speech-language pathologist. She received her doctorate in linguistics and cognitive science from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is an internationally recognized independent scholar in various subspecialties of linguistics. Marla has taught linguistics and English on four continents to diverse students,

Contributors ix

among whom she is appreciated for her quirky personality and wide-ranging interests. When asked nicely, she provides linguistic consulting services to various individual and corporate clients. Marla conducts field research on the island of Borneo among the Hobongan, working towards language documentation and conservation. Linda Pillière is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at AixMarseille Université, France, and a member of the Lerma Research Centre (UR 853). After completing a PhD on the linguistic aspects of Virginia Woolf’s style, she has focused on language variation and change, and stylistics. Linda’s recent publications include articles on normative editorial practices and varieties of English and a co-edited collection of essays with Cambridge University Press entitled Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language (2018). Linda is currently working on a monograph investigating the role of editorial practices. Giuliana Russo teaches the history of English, English language and linguistics, translation studies and English for specific purposes and media language in the Department of Humanities at the University of Catania, Italy. She received a PhD in English and American studies-linguistics in 2004. Giuliana’s research interests reside in both synchronic and diachronic linguistics and in particular historical grammaticography and lexicography. Alyssa A. Severin completed her PhD in linguistics at Monash University, Australia, in 2018. She currently teaches linguistics at Macquarie University and the University of New England. While her current work focuses on prescriptivism in online spaces, she has previously published work on Australian English speakers’ language attitudes. Alyssa’s 2017 publication in the Australian Journal of Linguistics received the Australian Linguistics Society’s Rodney Huddleston Award for the best paper published in the journal in that year. Nola Stephens-Hecker is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Covenant College, UK. She received her BA in linguistics and Germanic studies from Indiana University and her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University, where she specialized in child language development. After graduate school, Nola worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Penn State before moving to Covenant in 2012. Since transitioning to Covenant, Nola’s primary research interests have shifted to sociolinguistics and the intersection of language and religion. Loreta Vaicekauskienė is a Professor in the Centre of Scandinavian Studies at Vilnius University, Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Baltic, Lithuania. She is Head of the Centre of Sociolinguistics and Senior

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Researcher at the Research Institute of the Lithuanian Language and a board member of the Association for Applied Linguistics of Lithuania. Loreta’s research interests include language ideologies and planning, social meanings of language variation, language attitudes and global English. She is the author of Naujieji lietuvių kalbos svetimžodžiai: kalbos politika ir vartosena, a book on new borrowings in the Lithuanian language (Lietuvių kalbos instituto leidykla, 2007), and editor of two volumes on language ideologies and change, Lietuvių kalbos ideologija: norminimo idėjų ir galios istorija (with Nerijus Šepetys, Naujasis židinys-Aidai, 2016) and Lietuvių kalbos idealai: kaip keitėsi geriausios kalbos idėja (Naujasis židinys-Aidai, 2017). Marten van der Meulen is currently pursuing a PhD at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His project focuses on the interplay between prescriptivism and language use in 20th century Dutch, in particular with regard to morphosyntax. His other research interests include fact checks, science communications and cursing. Next to his academic work, Marten has (co-)authored several popular scientific books about language and is an avid blogger.

1 Introduction: Values and Binaries in Language Evaluation Jacob D. Rawlins and Don Chapman

1 Introduction

A quick survey of language blogs, letters to the editor, comment sections or YouTube videos will confi rm how important evaluating language variants is for people from all walks of life. But the importance of prescriptivism isn’t limited to internet cranks, complainers or so-called ‘Grammar Nazis’. Most people have some opinion as to how language should be used. As Deborah Cameron pointed out so well, language is so completely tied to our identity and experience that we cannot but evaluate it and assign moral judgement to its use (Cameron, 1995: 9–17). The constant evaluation of language use opens a large and fascinating question: How do individuals frame language evaluation into their selfperception, conduct and identity? This question can be examined from a number of different angles, but it should receive special attention from linguists. As Cameron put it, if evaluation of language is a part of using language, it is certainly a question that linguists should be interested in (Cameron, 1995: x–xiv). Indeed, we are seeing an increasing attention from linguists on language prescriptivism as a useful object of study. Calvet (2006) addresses language prescription briefly in his discussion of language security/insecurity but deliberately avoids focusing on language evaluation ‘so as not to set the judgements or the classifications of speakers against those of the linguist’ (Calvet, 2006: 152). Still, Calvet recognizes prescriptivism as an important player in sociolinguistic attitudes and language change. In the past decade, several edited collections have been published that recognize the connections between language judgements and larger social issues, particularly social issues that shed light on the practice of prescriptivism. Percy and Davidson (2012), for example, focused on the connections between standardization and nationalism, while Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Percy (2016) addressed standardization and tradition, and Pillière et  al. (2018) examined norms and traditions of language 1

2

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prescription. Tieken-Boon van Ostade has addressed questions of prescriptivism and the history of usage guides in volumes published in 2018 and 2020, as well as in her ongoing Bridging the Unbridgeable project, which has produced PhD theses and special journal issues. While each of these collections approaches the study of prescriptivism from different angles, each of the volumes has revealed additional facets of the operation of standardizing and prescriptive forces. The attention from linguists has complexified the view of language evaluation with multiple perspectives and foci so the simplified slogan ‘prescriptivism vs descriptivism’ is rendered largely meaningless in serious discussion. This volume continues to examine social connections to language evaluation as a follow-up to the examinations of nationalism, traditions and norms. In particular, this volume focuses on values. The importance of values in the operation of prescriptivism is implicit in the fundamental activity of evaluating variation. At their core, prescriptive pronouncements are expressions of individual or communal values, and they are often phrased in binary terms: good/bad, correct/incorrect, careful/ sloppy, formal/informal. As we would expect, however, language evaluations are made, diff used or disputed by a wide range of people who hold a wide range of values. Even fairly simple questions about values reveal the inadequacies of any binary formulation: Who values prescriptive pronouncements and why? How do prescriptive pronouncements derive from or challenge other values? What values are uncovered from studying the operation of prescriptivism? The binary labels applied to prescriptive pronouncements are really covering a multitude of values that come to play in making evaluations of language variation – a complex view that offers insights about language, but also about society, culture, individual and community identities, education, social status and social performance. In this volume, the contributors address values in linguistic prescriptivism from a variety of approaches and methods. As linguists, the authors share core professional values about language study that are often cast as opposing traditional prescriptivism. Yet the authors explore the value of linguistics for studying prescriptivism and the value of prescriptivism for illuminating language use. A recurring motif in this volume is self-reflection, as authors examine how their professional values relate to prescriptivism. Along the way, the authors identify several other ideologies and value configurations that inform responses to prescriptivism: natural/unnatural, religion, nationalism, education, and social interaction with wider groups. One insight that is shared among nearly all the authors in this volume is that the binaries that characterize prescriptive discourse – prescriptivism/descriptivism, correct/incorrect, standard/nonstandard – are inadequate for investigating the complexity of the phenomenon. The binaries undoubtedly serve their purposes for capturing broad trends, but they prove an impediment to a better understanding of prescriptivism and the values associated with it. Language variation is closely connected with the

Introduction: Values and Binaries in Language Evaluation

3

identities and values of speakers and groups of speakers (Coupland, 2007; Eckert, 2000; Edwards, 2009; Joseph, 2004), and those identities and values vary widely from individual to individual and community to community. While some members of a community may value the identifying features of ‘correct’ language and the accompanying boundary markers that denote members of different groups, other members of the same community may value linguistic variation and multilingual approaches that blur or change boundaries. The values are multiplex even within one individual. As Edwards states, ‘the multiplicity of identities, or facets of identity, is matched by a range of speech styles and behaviour. It is not only bilinguals who have more than one variety at their disposal: if we are not all bi- or multilingual, many are at least bi- or multi-dialectal – and all of us are bi- or multi-stylistic’ (Edwards, 2009: 3). Because language encapsulates values in a multitude of different ways and people use language for a multitude of purposes, and people speaking the same language have a multitude of different values, the number of distinct values of a large group of individuals is too great to be encapsulated by two ends of a spectrum. Rather, we need to acknowledge the entire spectrum. Some of the chapters in this volume address the inadequacies of the binaries head on, while others acknowledge the inadequacies less directly. But the sum effect is to explode the binaries so we can view the more complex phenomena associated with prescriptivism and the values of those who practice it. Of course, the term values is uncomfortably broad. In this introduction and in this volume, we use the term to encompass a number of senses. Perhaps the most salient sense, however, is sense 6.D. from the OED: ‘The principles or moral standards held by a person or social group; the generally accepted or personally held judgement of what is valuable and important in life’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘value’). In this regard, values are closely connected to a person’s connections to social groups or decisions on how to conduct life. The ‘principles or moral standards’ are highly dependent on individual interpretation and are constantly shifting, transforming and being reinterpreted. This deep personal dimension to values includes personal beliefs and social identifications that won’t be adequately represented by broad, binary labels. Yet the same deep personal dimension of values may at the same time reinforce the binaries as individuals make assumptions that there are only two options: an object is valuable or worthless; a political idea has value or no merit; a moral standard is accepted as valuable in a community or it is discarded. Paradoxically, the notion of values may well be responsible for both the tendency towards binaries and the inadequacy of them. As undergirding for the prescriptive impulse itself – certain linguistic variants are to be valued or deemed ‘correct’ or ‘good’ more than others – values can be seen to lead to the most conspicuous binaries. Whatever the reason for valorizing a particular linguistic variant (it is more elegant, clearer, more traditional, easier to analyze), the commitment to those

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values is what leads proponents to the proposition that only one form can be acceptable, while the others must not be. Similarly, the commitment to values is likely a major factor for the two-party system we fi nd in discussions of prescriptivism, where one is characterized as being either a prescriptivist or a descriptivist. More than anything, the discussion around these two terms characterizes individuals as having more or less of a commitment to the value of the prescriptive regulation of language. In this binary, prescriptivism and descriptivism fundamentally (and often irreconcilably) differ as to whether, how and why some linguistic forms should be privileged over others, and how those privileges should be extended across borders and through different communities. In recent years, academics have become more willing to engage directly with the binaries of prescriptivism/descriptivism in ‘a more balanced approach’ (Pillière et al., 2018: 8). This approach more fully recognizes the values of the many parties interested in linguistic prescriptivism: linguists, practitioners, governments, the media and the public. The chapters in this volume address the values and binaries in language prescription. The chapters converge on the ways in which values both enable and undermine the binaries we fi nd in prescriptivism. The chapters treat this topic from various angles. Some chapters treat this topic explicitly, questioning the utility of reducing all choices to two or whether descriptivism and prescriptivism can even really be separated from each other. Other chapters treat the topic more obliquely, as they investigate more specific questions, such as the role of national or religious identities in forming attitudes toward usage or the values encapsulated in mechanisms of regulation like handbooks or editing practices. While many of the chapters address these topics in the English tradition, some also examine the binaries in American German, Dutch, Hobongan and Lithuanian. What emerge from the combined chapters are many stimulating points of view that ultimately question the value of binaries by examining those binaries in connection with identities and values. The connections render traditional theoretical binaries inadequate and show that those binaries not only oversimplify the issues, but also prove detrimental to academic inquiry into language. This volume’s recurring central theme is exploring ways to examine and break down the binaries associated with prescriptivism to open new avenues for research into the complexities of language. 2 The Chapters

The chapters in this volume are organized into four broad sections, each of which confronts a different binary. In the first section, the chapters address the two-party system of prescriptivism vs descriptivism that has come to define the field of language prescription. In the second section, the focus shifts to the broader binary of prescriptivism and linguistics, particularly in the context of how advanced research methods lead to a

Introduction: Values and Binaries in Language Evaluation

5

breakdown of traditional binaries. The third section connects societal attitudes toward language prescription to the personal values of the people within those societies. The fourth and fi nal section addresses the values and actual practices of practitioners – editors and style guide authors. Together these four sections provide a deeper, more complex view of the questions surrounding language prescription and work to break down the barriers between the different linguistic camps. 2.1 Part 1: Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism: An Untenable Binary

In the first section of this volume, the authors reflect on the inadequacies of allowing the contest between prescriptivism and descriptivism to frame discussions of language variation. John Joseph sets the tone in Chapter 2 with his examination of the difficulties of separating descriptivism from prescriptivism. Descriptivism is about describing language as it is, but that description very easily slips into defi ning what language ought to be. Any attempt to accurately describe natural language involves value judgements, in what linguists consider normal, in the methods used to collect language data and in the discussion and use of the fi ndings. Joseph lays out several points that show the inadequacy of a conception of language study as being either prescriptivist or descriptivist. He is not claiming that self-conscious regulation is superior to the goals of description in linguistics, but he does argue that anti-prescriptivism is based on a false binary. Pure descriptivism is likely impossible to achieve, and the contest between prescriptivism and descriptivism is inadequate and can get in the way of language documentation and revitalization. These themes are picked up in Chapter 3, where Marla Perkins discusses the way ‘pure descriptivism’ is supposed to work in her documentation of Hobongan, an Indonesian language, and then shows how it actually works as an often messy combination of descriptive documentation and prescriptive decisions. Perkins notes the value of providing a description of the language to help the speakers gain group recognition from the Indonesian government. She argues, however, that any description of a language will necessarily exclude some variants. The language description cannot be value neutral because the values of the speakers will drive them in their decisions. Therefore, she illustrates Joseph’s argument that prescriptivism lies in use, not intent. In the attempt to describe the natural state of an endangered language, linguists can reify that language and privilege the points they reify. In Chapter 4, Don Chapman addresses the prescriptivism/descriptivism binary directly through an examination of the basic meanings of the two words, the values associated with them and the underlying assumptions in discussions of this binary. Most importantly, Chapman shows that there are a fuller range of values that are hidden by a slogan-level use of the prescriptivism/descriptivism binary. While there is some value in having contrastive terms, the terms themselves oversimplify the complex

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values that are packed into the language. Chapman unpacks the term descriptivism to go beyond its simple uses as anti-prescriptivism or nonprescriptivism to allow for a more nuanced view of the complexities of language variation. The primary theme of this first section is to set the stage for the rest of the volume by examining and deconstructing the overarching binary in discussions of language prescription. Recognizing the complex values and nuanced meanings that are used to construct the binary allows for a deeper inquiry into additional binaries and their effects on linguistics research, language use, government policy and practical application. 2.2 Part 2: Prescriptivism vs Linguistics: An Unnecessary Binary

The second section of this volume examines the broader binary of linguistics vs prescriptivism. While there is a notion that the study (and practice) of prescriptivism is antithetical to the study of linguistics, these authors show that binary to be unnecessary and unsustainable when the issues are examined using advanced research methods. In Chapter 5, Lieselotte Anderwald examines the influence of prescriptive rules on language change. Using quantitative methods, Anderwald shows that the binary of good/bad, standard/nonstandard language is not adequate, in part because several prescriptions simply distinguish vernacular from written English. She treats historical enregisterment to show that prescribing a standard form also reifies the nonstandard form – that by stigmatizing certain constructions of nonstandard language, prescriptive approaches are describing and defining those features. Through her study, Anderwald shows that not all grammarians are prescriptive all the time. Quite often they show a fairly keen sensitivity to language change and end up describing the language as much as they prescribe forms. Viktorija Kostadinova uses similar quantitative methods to evaluate the effects of prescriptivism on language use. Her conclusions confi rm the trends we are seeing in other studies: there is hardly any long-term influence, although there can be a little short-term influence from prescriptive rules. While Kostadinova focuses on the split infinitive as a case study, her larger contribution comes from providing methods that could be used for any usage item. She combines prescriptive advice as one factor among many that could account for variation in the split infinitive and uses multifactorial analysis to measure its influence. Another method she adds is examining the co-occurrence of the split infinitive with other proscribed variants: the question is not just whether split infinitives increase or decrease in writing over time, but whether they mainly co-occur with other proscribed forms, particularly those characteristic of vernacular language. Anderwald’s and Kostadinova’s similar approaches and methods have led them to a similar follow-up research question: How do prescriptive rules relate to vernacular language? This theme was not primary to their

Introduction: Values and Binaries in Language Evaluation

7

papers, but it is central to this volume. One of the values that the rules seem to encapsulate is a prejudice against the vernacular. As noted, the realization that the rules vary on the kind of English they are promoting disrupts the binary of correct vs incorrect and even standard vs nonstandard. In Chapter 7, Marten van der Meulen examines values encoded in the Dutch national identity by looking at the epithets that codifiers use to disapprove of proscribed variants. Van der Meulen discusses the changing values in prescriptivism in the Netherlands during the 20th century, showing that justifications for prescriptive rules reflect underlying values. The rules that prescriptivists focus on and the justifications they use manifest the values of the prescriptivists. In this analysis, it appears that the Dutch tradition is similar in many ways to the English tradition, suggesting that the same forces that motivate correctness in the English tradition are present in other language traditions. However, Dutch approaches to prescriptivism and linguistic purity are also highly influenced by their connection to the trends toward and pushback against nationalism in Western Europe after World War II. By examining the epithets used in the Dutch practice of prescriptivism, van der Meulen makes explicit the assumptions about language made by critics, which assumptions reveal the values of the critics. In the fi nal chapter in this section, Loreta Vaicekauskienë examines the societal values fi ltered through educational policy in Lithuania. Vaicekauskienë shows how the Lithuanian government sees language purism as an important value, not least because Lithuania has been subjugated to imperial language policy in the past. Through education and propaganda, the Lithuanian language is used to foster a national identity. This chapter offers another disruption of the binary, but from the other direction – trained linguists, who are traditionally descriptivists, have been co-opted as prescriptivists. This chapter subverts the binary between prescriptivist and descriptivist because Vaicekauskienë shows that many linguists are willing to use their skills completely in service to a prescriptivist enterprise that underscores national (or at least governmental) values. In another twist, prescriptivist regulation is not primarily designed to exclude the less powerful, but to defend against empire; one of its chief motivations is to recover the national identity after decades of Russian oppression, both politically and linguistically. The second section of this volume adds complexity in both research methods and linguistic traditions that serves to re-examine the binary between linguistics and prescriptivism. 2.3 Part 3: Responding to Correctness: Personal Values and Identity

The third section of the volume shifts from exploring binaries on a disciplinary or societal level to exploring how linguistic prescriptivism shapes (and is shaped by) the personal values and identities of specific communities.

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In Chapter 9, Carmen Ebner addresses the theoretical issues of values, identities and binaries directly, noting that besides regulating language, prescriptions serve the important function of demarcating identities, which often create binaries: ‘us’ vs ‘them’ or ‘good guys’ vs ‘bad guys’. Ebner looks at British and American attitudes toward two prescriptive rules. Among the most important identities that these examples reinforce are vernacular vs written and British vs American. These examples reinforce some binaries (vernacular/written and British/American) while disrupting others, especially correct/incorrect. Prescriptivism isn’t monolithic and must acknowledge that the ‘right forms’ in one community can be contrasted with entirely different ‘right forms’ in other communities. But the ‘right forms’ serve as an important piece of identity maintenance within communities. Alyssa Severin and Kate Burridge continue this theme of linguistic identity maintenance by looking at complaints about linguistic issues in the Australian tradition. Severin and Burridge argue that Australians have built a strong national identity based on the distrust of authority, yet there is plenty of evidence that they crave authoritative injunctions, particularly in language regulations. They examine Australian approaches to prescriptive language in contrast to the national values of independence and distrust of authority. In so doing, they also uncover many other identities that are reinforced by attitudes toward correctness, such as ‘old school’ vs ‘newer ways’ or ‘educated’ vs ‘permissive’. Through their empirical methods of examining complaints, Severin and Burridge are able to identify clearly the linguistic issues that the Australian public values. The next two chapters take a novel approach to identity, examining the role of prescriptive attitudes in reflecting a religious identity (cf. Edwards, 2009: 100). Chapter 11 by Nola Stephens-Hecker links attitudes toward right and wrong language with Christian believers’ larger views of language diversity as being either a problem (curse) or a benefit (blessing). She further links the Christian injunction toward charity with attitudes toward linguistic diversity. In this formulation of how to treat language diversity, Stephens-Hecker confronts the richer notion of language that Joseph articulates in the first section of the volume. She fi nds that the links between attitudes toward diversity of languages and attitudes toward proscribed forms are present, but not very strong, thus disrupting the moral/ reprehensible binary. People who see value in striving for obedience to God’s commandments are not necessarily inclined to see the same duty to observe prescriptive rules. However, for those who value authority (such as Christians who see the Bible as the ultimate authority on living), knowing and obeying rules can be a driving force of personal identity. In Chapter 12, Kate Burridge examines the linguistic values of a different Christian community, namely the Anabaptists (Mennonites) of southern Ontario. While this traditional faith community might be expected to mirror the approaches of the Christians in Stephens-Hecker’s

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study, the binary didn’t work for this community because they simply saw no need to regulate diversity. A principal value for the Anabaptists is humility, so privileging one language or dialect or even linguistic variant over another would be contrary to that value. This chapter stands out in contrast to Joseph’s arguments – and assumptions that are common in many prescriptivism studies – that prescriptivism is inevitable. Rather, Burridge shows that it is possible for a community to be aware of language variation without being evaluative or critical of that variation. The Anabaptist’s attitudes and statements about language connect with the values of the individuals within the community – just as we see in the English, Americans, Australians and Christians in the other chapters in this section. The connection of values to individual and societal identities and linguistic prescriptivism provides another complication to an investigation of the binaries: the binaries are present, not because they are oversimplifications of complicated ideas, but because they provide valuable tools for communities to create and maintain identities. These identities may be on a national level and carefully controlled, such as in the Dutch and Lithuanian traditions, or they may be more informal and connected to the values of a specific group (often a minority), such as the Hobongan, Biblical Christians or Anabaptists. But in each case, language and the rules surrounding it are valued as essential pieces of what makes that community unique and separate from other similar communities. 2.4 Part 4: Judging Correctness: Practitioner Values and Variation

In the fi nal section of this volume, the authors turn to prescriptive practitioners: those who create usage guides and employ prescriptive rules to copy edit published text. This section focuses on the complex values of the people who could be called ‘pure prescriptivists’, but whose motivations, values and practices show a much more nuanced approach to language. In each of the three chapters, the authors explicitly connect the values of practitioners to their actual practice. In Chapter 13, Giuliana Russo examines the values and assumptions of H.W. Fowler, the author of the most influential usage guide, Dictionary of Modern English Usage. While Fowler has often been characterized as a prescriber extraordinaire, the entries in his guide show that his values deeply influenced his judgements. In particular, Russo shows that Fowler’s position in society (and his desired position as part of a privileged social class) comes out in his attitudes toward language. Fowler privileges the distinguishing linguistic characteristics of the well-connected upper middle class. Chapter 14 tackles modern prescriptive values. Linda Pillière examines the importance of editors as enforcers of a linguistic standard. She compares the roles, attitudes and values of British editors and American

10

Language Prescription

editors in order to make larger arguments about national identities and notions of correctness. More importantly, however, she shows that editors are not a monolithic community determined to enforce grammatical rules. Rather, there are important distinctions between American editors and British editors and between older editors and younger editors. As with other communities, editorial actions toward language show the values of the editors, which (for the most part) tend toward improving prose rather than enforcing rules. And unlike the caricatures of editors, they are conscious of the complexities of language and are interested in improving clarity and concision rather than universally applying usage standards. The fi nal chapter in the volume continues the examination of copy editors. Jonathon Owen uses detailed empirical data to show the practices of professional and student copy editors. Similar to Pillière’s fi ndings, Owen shows that editors are not monolithic in their approaches to language prescription, 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 fi nal 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

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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.

2 Is/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 selfstanding; 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. 15

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[…] 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 crossexamining 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 mediated, so the Constitution ends up surreptitiously demanding the proliferation of those hybrids it claims to forbid. Such 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

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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 infi nitely 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) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

Nostalgia Classicism Authoritarianism Aestheticism Coherentism Logicism Commonsensism Functionalism 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.

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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.

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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 ‘piedpiped’ 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 fi nd, 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 an example, we need look no further than this very passage. It is superficially an observation, but with a prescriptive 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

20 Part 1: Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism

‘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

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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 ‘infi nite 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 fi nd 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 fi nds 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 eff ect 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.

22 Part 1: Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism

The classic mantra of descriptivist linguists is that ‘the native speaker cannot err’. This is fi ne 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 defi ning 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 it. A classic example is Chomsky’s (1964: 7) analysis of how hearers interpret a ‘deviant’ sentence such as Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Their mental 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

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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 defi ne 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

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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 socialpolitical 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;

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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, fi nd it challenging to the point of being practically impossible. Both of these facts matter – neither trumps the other; hence my call for us to temper, without necessarily abandoning, our rejection of a prescriptivism that plays its role in ensuring a cohesive political discourse while inevitably leaving some by the wayside as collateral damage. Lord Monboddo quipped that Hume died confessing, not his sins, but his Scotticisms. Were those constitutive or regulative rules? Surely both, which is to say: hybrids. Sins and Scotticisms can be conceived of as

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weaknesses of the flesh, if one prescribes Southern English forms as uniquely standard. Both can carry positive value, if your desired identity is as a Scot, or a Satanist – although the term Scotticisms implies that you are speaking English with Scots indices. If it is Scots to whom you are speaking, the number of Scotticisms will be zero, although you may have Anglicisms to confess. Also, talking about sins can lead us into another dimension of prescriptivism, that against taboo language – language that is bawdy, an adjective that derives from the noun body. Already in the 18th century we find complaints about ‘compulsive swearing’, which is attributed to ‘habit’, a naturalizing, physicalizing characterization of behaviour that an individual Subject should be able to overcome with an effort of mental will.13 Language standards are in general defi ned in opposition to ways of speaking too directly connected to the Nature of the body, as opposed to the mind (see Joseph, 2017b, 2018). Mind–body is another polarized dyad that will not prove sustainable. Recent approaches to the embodiment of mind and language give us a useful framework for understanding what it is that language standards aim to suppress. Pullum (2004 [2006]) notes that prescriptive rules are ‘reminiscent of the vacillating motivations for old-fashioned sex advice to the young. Don’t touch yourself down there, it’s dirty, you’ll go blind, it saps your strength, it’ll ruin you for marriage, it’s unhealthy, it’s immature, it’s immoral, it’s forbidden in the Bible.’ This is an astute observation. Rather than expose the prescriptivist emperor in his nakedness, though, it helps us to understand the power of these hybrid rules through which society exerts its control over nature, control that is neither complete nor non-existent. Proposition 6: Anti-Prescriptivism is Irreconcilable with Linguists’ Concern for Endangered Languages and Racial Equality

Your average Jo the Linguist pays lip service to vanishing linguistic diversity and may even set up programmes to teach minority languages in places where bilingualism is transitioning to monolingualism in a national or world language. Her concern is not consonant with the laissez-faire approach she takes when it comes to prescriptivism. Descriptivism means standing back, not getting involved; but concern for endangered languages involves value judgements about linguistic and cultural diversity, often combined with moral judgements about the forces thought to be behind the language shift. Of course, diversity, even if reduced, is never wholly lost. The world language that is being shifted to can take on its own identity value in its local form. Its recognition as a new language may not require, but is certainly much propelled by, the publication of grammars and dictionaries that describe, and by implication prescribe, norms of usage (see Joseph, 2014).

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In a conference at the University of York in June 2017, I spoke with a group of Hong Kong natives doing doctorates in various fields, for whom the Umbrella Movement of 2014 was their political awakening, entailing a questioning of who they are in terms of identity, Chinese or Hongkongese. The movement’s name signifies a disruption in the supposed unity of written Chinese. That unity is a cultural topos with particular power on the mainland, where there is less awareness of the use of traditional characters in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan instead of the simplified characters of the mainland. There is also less awareness of the fact that Hong Kongers sometimes deliberately write in ways that embody lexical and syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin. The standard written Chinese word for umbrella is 伞 săn. This is the simplified character; its traditional equivalent is 傘 saan 3, which one would expect to be used in Hong Kong Cantonese, but in fact the Hong Kong word for umbrella is 遮 ze1, which also means ‘cover’.14 When police launched a baton and tear gas charge against anti-government protesters in 2014, the protesters opened their umbrellas in defence. One of the locations of this confl ict was 遮打 ze 1 daa 2 ‘Chater’ Road, named for Sir Catchick Paul Chater, a 19th century British philanthropist of Armenian descent. Following the usual practice, the Chinese name for the road was made up using two characters that sound like the two syllables of Chater’s name, without regard to their meaning. In this case, the literal meaning of 遮打 ze1 daa2 is ‘cover hit/beat’ or, in Hong Kong Cantonese, ‘umbrella for protection against a beating’ – but that is opaque to speakers of Mandarin. 遮打 ze1 daa2 was adopted as the name of what is called in English the Umbrella Movement or Revolution. It signifies the autonomy of Hong Kong culturally, and by extension politically, and it does this in the supposedly unified writing system which is invoked as a cultural justification for absorbing Hong Kong into the People’s Republic of China rather than granting it independence. Talking with the postgraduate students at York was an occasion to witness people discussing the use of language prescriptivism to strengthen their national identity in pursuit of political freedom. One of them asked, ‘How can we ever achieve independence when we can’t even agree on a name for ourselves? Hongkongers? Hongkongese? Hong Kong something else?’ They considered how they might increase the distance between written Cantonese and standard written Chinese, to capture more fully the syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin that generally get brought into line in writing. The linguists and non-linguists among them all recognized that performing linguistic difference, against the currently prescribed norm but in ways that will become the new prescription, is crucial to their future and their children’s. In the ‘Black English trial’ (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District) that took place in my native Michigan in 1979, William Labov helped to persuade the court that

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Black English has a regular structure, rather than just being a cover term for haphazard errors in Standard English. And therefore, its speakers should have the same educational rights the US Supreme Court had granted to second language speakers five years earlier (see Joseph, 2017b; Labov, 1982). This liberation was achieved not by deconstructing prescriptivism, a strategy unlikely to have swayed the Court, but by extending the basic principle of prescriptivism to a nonstandard form of English. Treating its rules neither as thin constitutive ones nor thin regulative ones, but thick hybrid ones – showing that there are right and wrong ways of speaking it – made Black English a language in the legal sense. Educational systems are bound up with languages. Population movements over centuries have led to a small number of languages carrying particular economic advantages and social and educational power. Linguists’ interventions in the choices made by minority language communities are important, and it is often the case that getting recognition and respect for their languages as being real languages means showing that they have norms of usage that are prescriptive in nature, that are teachable and testable. Our interventions need to be done with sensitivity and thought, not in a polarized way that denies the language community’s right to defi ne its own well-being, its own basic values, and to not have these prescribed to them – even when what they seek from us is support for a prescriptivism that goes against our descriptivist grain. To conclude: Hume’s Guillotine is based on the belief that descriptions should be value neutral. Yet Hume’s own argument shows how deceptive this is – how descriptions can in fact contain value judgements, and perhaps cannot escape doing so when it is human behavioural norms that are being described. I have tried to show how our linguistic descriptions tend to involve a selection or hierarchization with an evaluative dimension that means we are dealing with thick concepts. We are not, in other words, the polar opposite of prescriptivists. In our thickness, we and they overlap. Anti-prescriptivism is a relic of purifying tendencies that we think we have generally moved beyond. I call upon my fellow linguists to recognize our own covert prescriptivism; to ponder the significance of languages being Saussurean systems of value; and to embrace our hybridity. Hopefully. Notes (1)

(2)

I am very grateful to the editors of this volume and to other colleagues for comments and discussion which helped to clarify issues raised in the following pages, both at the 2017 Prescriptivism Conference in Park City, UT, and at the practice run at the University of Edinburgh organized by my 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. On Saussure and modernism, see Joseph (2017a), and for an overview of Saussure, see Joseph (2012).

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(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 TiekenBoon van Ostade (2011). (5) This is not to say that every linguist will agree on the precise defi nition 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 defi ning 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.

References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ayres-Bennett, W. (2016) Codifi cation and prescription in linguistic standardisation: Myths and models. In F. Feliu and J.M. Nadal (eds) Constructing Languages:

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Norms, Myths and Emotions (pp. 99–129). Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Boden, M.A. (2008) Odd man out: Reply to reviewers. Artifi cial Intelligence 172, 1944–1964. Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene. London and New York: Routledge. Chomsky, N. (1964) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (2008) On phases. In R. Freidin, C.P. Otero and M.L. Zubizarreta (eds) Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory (pp. 133–166). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Curzan, A. (2014) Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. del Valle, J. (ed.) (2013) A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Saussure, F. (1916) Cours de linguistique générale (ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger). Lausanne and Paris: Payot. Fischer, J.L. (1958) Social influences on the choice of a linguistic variant. Word 14 (1), 47–56. Fromkin, V., Rodman, R. and Hyams, N. (2014) An Introduction to Language (10th edn). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Gibson, The Right Rev E., Bishop of London (1760) Admonition against Profane and Common Swearing: In a Letter from a Minister to his Parishoners; to be put privately into the Hands of Persons who are addicted to Swearing (20th edn). London: Printed by E. Owen in Warwick-Lane and sold by W. Johnston in Ludgate-Street. Hickey, R. (ed.) (2012) Standards of English – Codifi ed Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, A.A. (ed.) (1962) Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English, 9–12 May 1958. Austin, TX: University of Texas. Hume, D. (1738–1740) A Treatise of Human Nature, Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects & Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. London: Printed for John Noon. Jespersen, O. (1933) Essentials of English Grammar. London: Allen & Unwin. Joseph, J.E. (1981) The standard language: Theory, dogma, and sociocultural reality. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan. Joseph, J.E. (1987) Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages. London: Frances Pinter; New York: Basil Blackwell. Joseph, J.E. (2004) Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Joseph, J.E. (2006) Language and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Joseph, J.E. (2010) Hermeneiaphobia: Why an ‘inventive’ linguistics must fi rst embrace interpretation. In S. Sorlin (ed.) Inventive Linguistics (pp. 95–105). Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. Joseph, J.E. (2012) Saussure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joseph, J.E. (2014) How languages get their mojo. In H. McIlwraith (ed.) Language Rich Africa – Policy Dialogue: The Cape Town Language and Development Conference. Looking Beyond 2015 (pp. 124–132). London: British Council. Joseph, J.E. (2017a) Linguistics. In M. Bevir (ed.) Modernism in the Social Sciences: Anglo-American Exchanges, c. 1918–1980 (pp. 182–201). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joseph, J.E. (2017b) Extended/distributed cognition and the native speaker. Language & Communication 57, 37–47. Joseph, J.E. (2018) Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labov, W. (1982) Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: The case of the Black English Trial in Ann Arbor. Language in Society 11, 165–201.

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Latour, B. (1991) Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte. (English trans. Porter, C. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.) Lowth, R. (1762) A Short Introduction to English Grammar (revised edn). London: A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley. [Revised edn 1764.] Marckwardt, A.H. (1963) Dictionaries and the English language. English Journal 52 (5), 336–345. McNeill, D. (1966) Developmental psycholinguistics. In F. Smith and G. Miller (eds) The Genesis of Language (pp. 15–84). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ott, D. (2010) Grammaticality, interfaces and UG. In M.T. Putnam (ed.) Exploring Crash-Proof Grammars (pp. 89–104). Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Percy, C. and Davidson, M.C. (eds) (2012) The Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Poldauf, I. (1948) On the History of Some Problems of English Grammar before 1800. Prague: Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. Pouillon, V. (2016) The importance of prescriptivism in the development of ‘schemes for respelling’ in 18th century pronouncing dictionaries. In F. Feliu and J.M. Nadal (eds) Constructing Languages: Norms, Myths and Emotions (pp. 131–144). Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Pullum, G.K. (1974) Lowth’s grammar: A re-evaluation. Linguistics 137, 63–78. Pullum, G.K. (2004) Ideology, power, and linguistic theory. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, PA, 30 December. See http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/MLA2004.pdf for revised version (2006). Ross, J.R. (1967) Constraints on variables in syntax. PhD dissertation, MIT. Rutten, G. (2016) Standardization and the myth of neutrality in language history. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 242, 25–57. Rutten, G., Vosters, R. and Vandenbussche, W. (eds) (2014) Norms and Usage in Language History: A Sociolinguistic and Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Sampson, G. and Babarczy, A. (2014) Grammar without Grammaticality. Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter. Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sobelman, H. (1964) Review of R.M.W. Dixon, Linguistic Science and Logic (The Hague: Mouton, 1963). Word 20, 283–292. Strang, V. (2004) The Meaning of Water. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Strunk, W. Jr. (1920) The Elements of Style. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe. Strunk, W. Jr. and White, E.B. (1972) The Elements of Style (2nd edn). New York: Macmillan. [Reworking of Strunk (1920).] Taylor, T.J. (1997) Theorizing Language: Analysis, Normativity, Rhetoric, History. Oxford: Pergamon. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2011) The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. and Percy, C. (eds) (2016) Prescription and Tradition in Language: Establishing Standards across Time and Space. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Veblen, T. (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: Macmillan. Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. Yáñez-Bouza, N. (2015) Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English: Preposition Placement 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 Inferring Prescriptivism: Considerations Inspired by Hobongan and Minority Language Documentation Marla Perkins

1 Introduction

Beginning with introductory linguistics courses and continuing throughout graduate education and into professional publication, prescriptivism is presented to linguists as an inadequate way of analyzing linguistic material, and descriptivism is presented as a vastly preferable alternative. This type of bifurcated thinking might be useful as a way to introduce people to the idealized goals of linguistic analysis, but in actual linguistic practice, pragmatically inferable prescriptivism can affect the ways in which linguistic analyses are created, interpreted and used. In this chapter, the prescriptive/descriptive concepts and their complications are examined in light of my ongoing linguistic description of Hobongan. Studying prescriptivism was not part of the project when I began documenting Hobongan; the goal was to produce a linguistic description of the language, from a descriptive standpoint. But I have encountered many complexities while documenting this language, and they have necessitated a re-evaluation of the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide. These encounters provide the foundation of this chapter. My focus on Hobongan, then, does not stem from any particular aspect about that language with regard to prescriptivism, although in retrospect, the graded social status of the various dialects and the language planning policies of Indonesia, both topics addressed below, have undoubtedly been a catalyst for many of my thoughts. Presumably any language being documented for the first time and with enough social variation among its speakers would prompt similar questions. The decisions required for managing variation in language documentation as well as the consequences of those decisions are the key features that would be shared in several language documentation endeavors, and responding to those challenges opens up questions about prescriptive practice in general. 32

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1.1 Introduction to the language and community: Hobongan

Hobongan is an Austronesian language, according to its categorization as provided by a survey of the languages of Borneo (Hammarström et al., 2017; Lewis et al., 2016; Sellato & Sercombe, 2007). Syntactically, it is primarily Subject Verb Object (SVO), and morphologically it is primarily analytic. For this chapter, the social context of the language is crucial. The language is spoken by approximately 2000 people across three generations and is the dominant language in the geographic area in which it is spoken. This dominance is evidenced by the fact that people wish to marry into the Hobongan group, partially because there is gold along the parts of the Kapuas River that lie within traditional Hobongan territory. There are five main Hobongan villages mostly along the Kapuas Hobongan Rivers, with some smaller groups living farther from the main rivers. In part because of their frequent travel along the river and their community involvement in major events, the Hobongan interact across village groups frequently, which minimizes dialectal variation across groups but does not minimize such variation across generations. The Hobongan mostly maintain a traditional lifestyle, with a few exceptions. They now travel regularly to a town, Putussibau, where they can exchange gold for cash and buy supplies that they do not readily produce themselves. Education has changed enormously: the Indonesian government provides a schoolteacher for the elementary school children in the community, and all elementary education takes places in Bahasa Indonesian (BI), the official language of the Indonesian government, except for one course in Christian religion that was developed by a missionary who works with the Hobongan. If families want children to continue their education beyond the elementary grades, the children must move into town and fi nd people with whom to live while they attend school, most of which takes place in BI or in a local lingua franca. In part because of the shift in education, living within the Hobongan community after graduation is optional, and some Hobongan have chosen to live permanently in town, rather than to return to the Hobongan villages and lifestyle.

1.2 Terms and methods

For the purposes of this chapter, prescriptivism and descriptivism are defi ned as they are customarily defi ned within the field of linguistics (Drake, 1977: 1, for example), with prescriptivism involving a ‘concern for “correctness”’ and a desire to ‘enforce uniformity and conformity to some absolute standard,’ and descriptivism involving ‘analyzing language as it currently functions in actual use.’ Drake emphasizes the notions of conformity and stability in prescriptivism, and of change and diversity in descriptivism.

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The type of fieldwork conducted in this project is community-based language research (CBLR). Czaykowska-Higgins (2009) described CBLR as language research conducted on a language or languages, for the language community, with the language community and by the language community. In other words, the linguists involved are active participants as opposed to external observers (Dimmendaal, 2001), and native speakers are involved in the process of data collection and analysis, both as sources of data and as experts on the language or languages that they speak. 2 Prescriptivism after Description

Due to the complexities of languages and of the situations in which language research is conducted, there are many possible ways in which prescriptivism can interact with the research process. Despite language description often meeting the core criteria of descriptivism, in that it is based on and promotes documentation of change and promotion of diversity over conformity, the realities of how on-the-ground linguistic analysis is used challenge those core criteria. Many parties have an interest in language descriptions, and each introduces inferences and preferences into the interpretations and uses of descriptions. Some of these uses are perhaps inevitable, but I hope that this analysis of how descriptions are often understood and used prescriptively can influence and improve the ways in which descriptions are created and used so as to benefit the people involved. 2.1 In the field

It might be hoped that when a linguist is in the field, working among members of a language community, prescriptive ideas can be minimized to the point of elimination. However, a variety of factors contribute to making prescriptive ideas and ideals an integral part of the fieldwork situation. 2.1.1 In the field: Data collection – what is collected?

One way in which descriptive practice is inferentially introduced into prescriptivism derives from traditions about what information is typically included in language descriptions. My survey of descriptions of over 50 languages from over 30 language families showed (see Perkins, 2017, for a publication of some of the results) that a majority of those descriptions did not include material on discourse, units of the language that are larger than the sentence, as Pike (1964) called them. In other words, the descriptions included information about phonology (sound systems), morphology and syntax, but omitted analyses of narratives or other texts. In some cases, texts were included, but more typically, sentences were the largest units described, analyzed or included. Because many kinds of discourses are important in the languages of the world, including oral histories,

Inferring Prescriptivism: Minority Language Documentation 35

recitations of familial relationships, religious or ceremonial material and other types of narratives, this oversight seems all the more serious. It is unlikely that the linguists who assembled these descriptions failed to notice the importance of these materials to the people with whom they worked. Indeed, my own experience among the Hobongan suggests that larger-than-sentence discourses are vastly more important to native speakers of a language than are the syntactic, morphological or phonological details. There could be a variety of phenomena that contribute to this omission. An important aspect might be the traditional inertia in the field of linguistics.1 If linguists are trained in field methods, much of that training is based on the resources already available. If linguists need to train themselves in field methods or update their knowledge about a specific language family, they rely on the materials that are already available. When a linguist settles into a language community to conduct linguistic research and work towards a description, all of the linguistic information, including sociolinguistic information and the discourse types important to that community, is freshly available to the linguist. The task of sorting through it is immediately overwhelming, and field linguists must make decisions about how to proceed in collecting and organizing data. Consulting previous language documentation is a natural strategy: if a language does not have a description, it is likely that closely related languages have been described, and their patterns can provide a way into the analysis. But in the past, phonology, morphology or syntax have been the aspects of language most often included in language descriptions, with no explanation or theory-driven account provided for the customary omission of anything beyond syntax. Thus, phonology, morphology and syntax still constitute the core of most linguistic descriptions today. This omission means that resources allowing linguists to compare and contrast structures cross-linguistically are predominantly available for the above-mentioned aspects (see Perkins, 2017, for a typological approach to analysis of narrative discourse). The common availability of certain kinds of information (phonology, morphology, syntax) and the corresponding unavailability of other kinds of information (semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc.) pragmatically suggest that the phonology, morphology and syntax are more important to descriptions than other kinds of linguistic information are. In my experience with Hobongan, which would likely apply to work with other minority languages, the analyses of sound systems, morphology and syntax are relatively simplified because of the wealth of material on a wide variety of languages, while the analyses of other aspects of language are made more difficult by having to forge a new path. This difficulty, and the additional time and effort required to do the analyses of larger-than-sentence materials, no doubt inhibit some linguists and other field workers from going beyond the background that is available to them.

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This privileging of phonology, morphology and syntax may reflect a bias towards what Joseph calls the ‘natural’ rather than the ‘humanoriented’ (see Joseph, this volume). The study of phonology, morphology and syntax has typically emphasized their systematic status more than their connections to societal concerns. In that regard, those areas of linguistics may seem further removed from societal or human contingencies, and thus may seem more ‘natural’, whereas sociolinguistic, discourse and pragmatic concerns may seem more ‘human-derived’. Joseph claims that this same bifurcation provides the foundation that divides descriptivism (natural) from prescriptivism (artificial). Descriptivism aims to identify what is natural about language, without recourse to the human element, which is inherently impossible because languages are imagined, constructed and used by real people in real situations. Without the human element, there is no language to be described. It could be that this same bias for the ‘natural’ ends up privileging the areas of language least connected to the societal concerns of the people who speak the languages. This traditional omission of any aspect of language beyond syntax is sometimes enshrined in what linguists have come to accept in a published (or publishable) description. Comrie and Smith (1977) published an extensive outline of questions to ask when collecting and analyzing information for language descriptions. This outline includes material on sound systems, syntax and morphology, but not one question, much less a section, on any other domain. The questionnaire has been used as an informational template for several language descriptions. Comrie and Smith provide this questionnaire with the best intentions of helping linguists ensure that their descriptions are as complete as possible and that the material contained within their descriptions is comparable across descriptions, but this approach has a number of difficulties. One of the main difficulties is that nothing beyond phonology, morphology or syntax is included. As noted, aspects of language beyond these three elements are more important to native speakers, making this inventory of material inadequate for what native speakers need. Another drawback is that not every language has the same patterns as other languages, making large portions of the questionnaire irrelevant for many languages while potentially omitting material that is relevant, even within sound systems, morphology and syntax, particularly in languages that have not yet been descriptively analyzed. Descriptions written according to this kind of questionnaire are therefore linguistically incomplete in ways that could be avoided if a less prescriptive approach to the contents of descriptions were more acceptable within the field. Fortunately, this approach to description has been changing over the past couple of decades. More and more linguists are including more kinds of linguistic information in their descriptions, making their descriptions truer to the rich variety of languages and what language speakers can do with their languages.

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This traditional focus on only certain aspects of language and the neglect of others is not usually included in the notion of linguistic prescriptivism, yet the effects are similar. Analogous to the ways in which language prescriptivism favors certain variants over others, professional biases favor certain language domains over others in language descriptions. Additionally, in the way that favored variants in language prescriptivism can come to be seen as more legitimate than others, the most-described domains of language can also come to be seen as more legitimate, even more linguistic. The bias already present in previous descriptions has a way of perpetuating itself, not unlike the traditional character of language prescriptivism. While the linguists who write and consult these descriptions have no intention of telling speakers how they should use or think about language, linguists might still be susceptible to the ‘is becomes ought’ process that Joseph outlines in this volume. What has been done in descriptions previously often continues to be done. This kind of unstated bias is particularly difficult to identify and be honest about. Once recognized, however, it becomes clear that the kinds of information collected often reflect the ideals of linguists that have arisen through the history of the discipline more than they reflect realities among members of a language community. In recordings and observations that I have made in which people were spontaneously engaged in language use, the clear majority of the content comprised personal narratives, discussions of current and future events, recitations of genealogies and other types of discourse. Overt discussion of structures in words or sentences was rare, occurring only for about 15 minutes as part of a single and unusual discussion of sociolinguistic phenomena. The Hobongan used specific examples of words, as well as personal narratives of their experiences, to comment on their sociolinguistic situation; they framed their discussion and discourse sociolinguistically rather than syntactically. If linguists were objective and descriptive observers of the language around them in a field situation, then discourses, and the pragmatics that make discourses work, would be the major component of description, followed by sociolinguistics, with only a few examples of sentences and sounds-in-words – a pattern that is nearly opposite to how content is managed in traditional language descriptions. Furthermore, a question is raised about how traditional limitations on descriptions might have affected or might continue to affect language conservation efforts. When language descriptions provide material that looks drastically different from native speakers’ language usage, and those descriptions are then presented to speakers as descriptions of their languages, speakers could decide that, if that is what their languages really look like, there is no reason to conserve them. Their languages could become unrecognizable even to the speakers, and what remains recognizable would be only a tiny portion of what the languages are to and for the speakers.

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2.1.2 In the field: Working with language informants

Working with informants introduces many complexities. The fact that linguistic description is often based primarily and exclusively on data provided by native informants can be similar to prescriptivist practice and have similar effects, in that the informants perform the role of the expert much like the prescriber in the prescriptive tradition. Often, a description of a language rests on the information provided by a single native speaker or, at best, a few speakers. The information, therefore, is literally an ipse dixitism, which is one of the hallmarks of prescriptivist practice. In a way, the description of the language rests on the intuitions of a single speaker or a small group of speakers, just as the description of a ‘correct’ language in the prescriptive tradition rests on the opinions of prescribers, who separate themselves from those who are pragmatically presented as the hoi polloi of language users. The motivations, of course, are different. The informants are not necessarily proscribing any forms by offering their own intuitions, whereas the prescribers are. Yet, depending on the number of informants and their representativeness of all speakers, the effects of their information can be similar to the effects of language prescriptivism. What counts as a native speaker is a question that has been raised and answered in a variety of ways (see Bonfiglio, 2010: 8–20, for a review of some of the major possibilities, along with Kalogjera & Starčević, 2014). In practice, native speakers, those who grew up speaking within a language community, have a variety of levels of expertise and of willingness to share whatever expertise they have with a researcher. The native speakers who contribute to language descriptions are therefore a group of people who are often partially self-selected by their willingness to help and partially available simply because of geographical and personal background. They are, therefore, usually not a representative sample, statistically or otherwise, of the community of language speakers. 2.2 Using descriptions

Prescriptivism continues to be evident once a description is completed. Many parties have an interest in language descriptions, and each introduces preferences into the uses of descriptions. Some of these uses are perhaps inevitable, and awareness of the ways in which people’s preferences guide the uses of descriptions could perhaps allow linguists to create descriptions that are as descriptive as possible while still being useful. 2.2.1 For language preservation: Maintaining diversity, minority rights

One outcome of linguistic description and analysis, particularly of minority languages, is the documentation and preservation of those minority languages and cultures. In some cases, a basic description of a language is all that is left of a language and culture whose native speakers have all died. Language documentation itself is therefore a form of

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prescriptivism, with the prescriptive idea being that any language and culture is worthy of preservation and therefore ought to be preserved in whatever form can be managed, whether that is through basic documentation alone or with more thorough work. Currently, the Hobongan language is fairly stable, being spoken by the three generations of people who are recognized as generations: children, people who have children, and people who have grandchildren. However, because there are few speakers, only about 2000, and because of economic, bureaucratic and educational pressures, the Hobongan might not be able to maintain their language without significant linguistic, educational and institutional support. The Hobongan themselves have recognized that their language is changing in ways that make it less Hobongan and less spoken by their children, 2 and they have, to some extent, recognized the major causes of those shifts. They know that when they go to Putussibau to trade, the interactions are conducted in BI and a local trade language known as Malayu (not to be confused with Bahasa Melayu as used in Malaysia). They know that the Indonesian government requires all documentation of marriages, baptisms and citizenship to be in BI, and that official documentation has certain benefits such as the ability to travel or receive healthcare. They know that educating their children in BI is having drastic effects on the language and culture. They have noted with dismay that grandparents cannot discuss night-time dreams with their grandchildren because the grandchildren do not have the same expertise in the Hobongan language (having been educated in BI) or culture (having spent large portions of their childhoods living in Putussibau in order to go to school). Despite understanding many of the factors that are impinging on the Hobongan language and culture, the Hobongan have yet to take steps that would help them to maintain their language and culture. 3 Such steps could include developing grade school curricula in Hobongan so that their children can stay in the Hobongan villages for their education and maintain their everyday uses of the language, or recording their oral histories as part of what is needed to gain minority rights from the Indonesian government. Many Hobongan do participate eagerly as language informants, moving the description along towards completion, which will in turn be available to them if they decide to move forward in the process of gaining minority rights. As a linguist, I prefer to think that the Hobongan should, prescriptively, work towards preserving their language and culture by the means that are available to them, but this is a decision that cannot and probably should not be made by others. Language preservation works best when the language speakers themselves wish to preserve the language, a principle that is available from descriptive studies of language preservation efforts (e.g. Crystal, 2000). Although the Hobongan recognize the pressures on their language and culture and are not pleased by some of the changes,

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particularly when those changes negatively affect familial intimacy, they have not made the decisions that I would prefer that they make. Instead, they have made decisions that benefit them in ways that are more important to them than maintaining their uniqueness as Hobongan. These kinds of differences between what a linguist might want for a language community and what community members themselves might want come from differing perspectives. Linguists typically focus primarily on languages. Members of the community focus on all aspects of their lives including, in the case of the Hobongan, economic factors and social status, both of which can be enhanced by giving up the language, or at least by making significant concessions to the majority language and culture. Until languages and the people who speak those languages are valued for their unique contributions, by linguists, by language speakers and by those with power and influence in the majority language and culture, language preservation efforts will have to compete with all other complications of minority status. 2.3 For education and creativity

If the Hobongan were to develop grade-school curricula, the question arises as to what form of the language would be used and taught in school. Language descriptions typically privilege one dialect or form of a language over another, usually in an effort to provide the expected single description of a complex situation and to make the writing of a description doable in a fi nite amount of space and time. Despite the complexities involved in the creation of language descriptions, description materials are often used for creating standard forms and therefore a single, simpler form of a language, which then, through the educational process, become the forms that people ‘ought’ to use and that are taught in schools (Kalogjera & Starčević, 2014). In Hobongan, /r/ and /d/ are both produced in a variety of environments, leading to two main possibilities: they are allophonic variants of a single phoneme or they are different phonemes. Native-speaker consultants differ in their opinions as to whether they are different phonemes or different allophones. The missionaries who worked on creating a writing system for Hobongan treated the variants as allophonic variations, despite some native-speaker insights to the contrary. They were probably correct to make a decision: one language cannot be written in multiple ways without negative outcomes for understandability. The writing system itself is then reinforcing, in some ways prescribing, a certain understanding of the phonology of the language. In addition, even though both main possibilities are included in the description-in-progress, and even though both main possibilities are in frequent use by native speakers, one understanding and use occurs in 10–15% of cases, and one understanding and use occurs in 85–90% of cases. Curricula necessarily oversimplify material to minimize possible

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confusion for students (minimizing confusion is a prescriptive ideal; presenting material in its full complexity has not, to my knowledge, ever been tried, particularly at elementary levels of instruction). That kind of minimization would likely privilege the majority version of the language over minority versions of the language, as has already happened in the orthography. In the case of Hobongan, such privilege might not appear to be a huge problem, but in other languages, such as Daqan and English, in which dialect variations are major parts of life, such privilege can disadvantage thousands or millions of people, as well as provide access to the advantages of the majority language and culture. The prescriptivism that can be developed from descriptions has real consequences for individuals and minorities-within-minorities. On the other hand, as an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, noting variations in languages can be a way to generate interest among students of language and linguistics and could therefore be used to enhance the education of students and the preservation of variants. However, even if variants are presented, they tend to be presented in contrast to a standard. This pattern might not need to be the case, but as a student and professor of linguistics at various times, I have never encountered a presentation in which variants were truly treated as options among equivalents, and my own efforts in that direction have been inadequate. Often, a description provides the standard by which variants are defi ned as such. There is a standard, and there are variants, and descriptions often contribute to making that distinction. For example, if I had been working primarily with one of the outlying groups of Hobongan speakers, rather than with one of the larger groups in one of the larger villages, I might have privileged, intentionally or not, a set of variations that are used by a small minority of people. A description based on that privilege could pragmatically imply that the variant described is the standard. If the description were used as the basis for curricula, the minority variant would become the standard, and a majority of students would be educated to conform to a minority variant. It is not necessarily ethically preferable to educate minority students to conform to a majority variant, or vice versa. A language description that includes some variants, noting who uses the variants and when and how, would pragmatically privilege some variations over others, even if the information in the description were purely descriptive, because the social distinctions, and the sociolinguistic markers that indicate those distinctions, would emerge from the description. The form of a language chosen and used for education, then, becomes the form of a language preferred when language is used for writing. As a reviewer pointed out, in language descriptions, privileging some aspects of language such as syntax, over others such as analyses of various common genres, might suggest to native speakers that the privileged aspects of the language are in fact more important than the others. This privileging approaches a prescriptive-style focus on form over larger-level

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structures in the language which contrasts with the descriptive importance of larger-than-sentence units of language. The Hobongan have already lost several genres of chants and incantations in converting to Christianity. Their language considered as langue is important enough to warrant documentation and translation efforts, but their uses of language might not be important enough to them to maintain. Nevertheless, the Hobongan might begin to record their remaining oral histories, stories and songs and to create new histories, stories and songs. Furthermore, traditional materials might exist in parts of the community whose language variety has not been recorded or given priority in description, but when the materials are recorded in written form, that written form would probably be what is standardized for education, which is the context in which people acquire writing. The standard form will miss some of the information that might have been available if each variant were given equivalent importance. A language description can have prescriptive consequences for any given language well into the future. 2.4 For ease of governance and commerce

Language descriptions are also used by agents of governments to determine whether people should receive legal or institutional protections for their language and, if so, what those protections should be. Language documentation is a crucial component of gaining minority rights in Indonesia because people are assumed to be Indonesian and speak BI until the people can document that they are who they say they are. Ironically, minorities must accommodate majority language and ways of doing business in order to demonstrate that they are not the majority. As with using language descriptions for developing educational materials, one variety of a language is typically privileged over other varieties, in part because the complexities of language in actual use make governance of actual people extraordinarily difficult. A description can be used, in prescriptively bestcase scenarios, to protect minorities and individuals, but it can also be used to impose the prescriptive ideals of the majority-within-the-minority on all members of a community, because descriptions necessarily privilege one form of a language over other forms. The fi nite and descriptive necessities of language documentation can therefore justify or become government policies, again making for real consequences for real people. 3 Summary and Conclusion

How is a linguist to live with herself? The practicing linguist has been trained to conduct language description and analysis without oughttas, haftas or s’postas. What often happens with language descriptions is that linguists do their descriptive jobs to the best of their abilities, but through the process of language description and publication, inferences about

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what is or is not valuable regarding a language can affect what is done with those descriptive materials. 3.1 A false bifurcation

In this consideration of the process of creating a language description, the descriptive–prescriptive bifurcation has been shown to be inaccurate, impossible or unhelpful in various ways (see also Cameron, 1995; Milroy, 1992; among others). More options are needed. At the very least, the bifurcation needs to be expanded.4 The concepts remain useful, particularly if field linguists are aware of the concepts and how to appropriately use them during the field process. There are multiple origins for prescriptivism. Some prescriptivism arises out of the necessities of accessing native-speaker expertise, including disagreements about the language. Some prescriptivism arises out of differences in priorities, such as the difference between a linguist’s idea that each language is inherently valuable and some language speakers’ ideas that being able to participate in the perceived prosperity of the majority culture is more important than retaining a language. Some prescriptivism makes language description possible but then arises on the other side of the description, such as in privileging a majority over a minority language form when creating educational or new language materials. And some prescriptivism can be used, depending on the people behind its uses, to protect or discriminate against speakers of minority languages. When even contradictory outcomes are possible, it is difficult for descriptive linguists to know how to create the most relevant and least damaging materials. 3.2 Where to go from here?

With several types of both prescriptivism and descriptivism available, the continued use of the bifurcation remains questionable. It might be clearer to those conducting research and those contributing to research and those using research if different terms were available for the different concepts required by the realities of field research. Discussions of variation, deviance (Chomsky, 1995; Zahedi, 2007) and idiolect are crucial in the development and applications of more specific terms that are predicated on the sources of prescriptivism and whether that prescriptivism is used to benefit or to harm. The concepts might vary depending on what arises in any given field situation, as well. If so, a reconsideration of the terms and concepts based on what is found in field situations could become necessary. Descriptive research might again become the driving force behind not just descriptive theoretical development, but also developments in explanatory theory.

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Acknowledgements

The specific language informants do not wish to be individually identified, but they must be acknowledged as a group for their consistently generous, thoughtful and profound contribution to the research on Hobongan. My work has also been immeasurably aided by Rachel Searcy, whose knowledge of Hobongan language and culture has made much of this research possible. Notes (1) There are notable exceptions, for example: Greene (1999) wrote a description of Belizean Creole which was based primarily on a sociolinguistic analysis of the language; Sonora Yaqui Language Structures (Dedrick & Casad, 1999) includes several narratives with some analysis of the structures of those narratives; Kieviet (2017) includes a more generous selection of interlinear texts than many other descriptions, although the author limits himself to analysis of sounds-through-syntax. (2) I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer who brought to my attention the fact that older generations can be dismayed by language changes and start insisting that a language be spoken in an ‘authentic’ way and that such insistence, which is an attempt to preserve a language, can have devastating effects on younger people’s willingness to try to speak the language (e.g. Dorian, 1994, for East-Sutherland Gaelic). (3) As of early 2019, a Hobongan student decided to continue on to university to study education, with the stated goal of returning to the Hobongan villages to teach students in Hobongan. I sincerely hope that she can continue towards her goal and will be able to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to develop a curriculum in her fi rst language. There is broad community support for her project, but whether that translates into concrete support after she graduates remains to be seen. (4) Some linguists have emphasized norms and normativity instead of standards and prescription in an attempt to distinguish more precisely the types of interventions made to establish the status of a language (see Armstrong & Mackenzie, 2013; Haas, 1982).

References Armstrong, N. and Mackenzie, I.E. (2013) Standardization, Ideology, and Linguistics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge: MIT Press. Comrie, B. and Smith, N. (1977) Lingua descriptive studies: Questionnaire. See http:// imp.lss.wisc.edu/~jrvalent/LIN427F2005web/attachments/LDSQWordOutline.doc. Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2009) Research models, community engagement, and linguistic fieldwork: Reflections on working with Canadian indigenous communities. Language Documentation and Conservation 3 (1), 15–50. Dedrick, J.M. and Casad, E.H. (1999) Sonora Yaqui Language Structures. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Dimmendaal, G.J. (2001) Places and people: Field sites and informants. In P. Newman and M. Ratliff (eds) Linguistic Fieldwork (pp. 55–75). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Dorian, N.C. (1994) Purism vs. compromise in language revitalization and language revival. Language in Society 23 (4), 479–494. Drake, G.F. (1977) The Role of Prescriptivism in American Linguistics, 1820–1970. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Greene, L.A. (1999) A Grammar of Belizean Creole: Compilations from Two Existing United States Dialects. Bern: Peter Lang. Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M. and Bank, S. (eds) (2020) Glottolog 4.2.1. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. See http://glottolog. org/resource/languoid/id/hovo1239 Haas, W. (1982) Introduction: On the normative character of language. In W. Haas (ed.) Standard Languages Spoken and Written. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kalogjera, D. and Starčević, A. (2014) Deconstruction of the native speaker and ideology of the standard language: Language users caught between descriptivism and manipulation. English Studies as Archive and as Prospecting 9, 18–21. Kieviet, P. (2017) A Grammar of Rapa Nui. Berlin: Language Science Press. Lewis, M.P., Simons, G.F. and Fennig, C.D. (eds) (2016) Hovogan. In Ethnologue: Languages of the World (19th edn). Dallas, TX: SIL International. See http://www. ethnologue.com. Milroy, J. (1992) Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell. Perkins, M. (2017) Toward a typology of ranking elements of narrative discourse in languages and cultures: A cross-linguistic survey. International Journal of Literary Linguistics 6 (1). See https://journals.linguistik.de/ijll/article/view/101 Pike, K.L. (1964) Beyond the sentence. College Composition and Communication 15 (3), 129–135. Sellato, B. and Sercombe, P.G. (2007) Introduction: Borneo, hunter-gatherers, and change. In P. Sercomb and B. Sellato (eds) Beyond the Green Myth: Borneo’s Huntergatherers in the 21st Century (pp. 1–49). Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Zahedi, K. (2007) Grammaticality in the minimalist program. Journal of Human Sciences 55, 85–94.

4 Are You a Descriptivist or a Prescriptivist? The Meaning of the Term Descriptivism and the Values of Those Who Use It Don Chapman

1 Introduction

In a domain dominated by binaries, prescriptivism vs descriptivism is one of the most fundamental. The pair shows up frequently in a variety of discourses, from introductory linguistic textbooks, to usage guides, to internet discussions. The term descriptivism, with its variants descriptivist and descriptive, is clearly useful as a contrast to prescriptivism, but it suffers from being mostly defi ned by what it is not: it is ‘not prescriptivism’. This chapter aims to uncover more of the nuances of the term descriptivism. In the process, I will also argue that descriptivism is much more loaded, polysemous and ambiguous than the simple binary would imply. Indeed, the term amply illustrates what Susan Fitzmaurice calls ‘contingent polysemy’; that is, the word accrues different denotations and connotations depending on the stance and ideological commitments of those who use it. Those with opposing stances may not even recognize that others might attach different connotations and denotations to the term. While it is useful to have a term to contrast with prescriptivism, the overload on descriptivism may actually impede better understanding in discussions about prescriptivism; at the very least, descriptivism needs to be unpacked to be of greater use in discussions of prescriptivism. I fi rst noticed the complexity of descriptivism when a student I had just met asked, ‘Are you a prescriptivist or a descriptivist?’ ‘… I’m a prescriptivist,’ she offered. The question struck me as odd. I knew what a descriptivist or a prescriptivist approach to language was – or at least I thought I did, way back then before I started writing this chapter – but I

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didn’t know you could use the terms to sort people into one group or another, almost like political parties or religions. Not sure what to tell her, I mumbled something about not feeling comfortable labeling myself as either, and that at diff erent times I concerned myself with both approaches. I’m not the fi rst to have been bothered by the presumed binary in the prescriptivist-vs-descriptivist formula. Several scholars have noted the inadequacy of these opposing terms (Cameron, 1995: 5–8; Curzan, 2014: 15; Hodson, 2006: 59). Steven Pinker (2012), for example, describes a ‘thoughtful nondichotomous position’, while Edwin Battistella (2005: 21) offers ‘a realist position’. Other scholars have noted that the two -isms cannot be separated so easily from each other (Finegan, 1998: 545; Joseph, 1987: 18, this volume; Taylor, 1990: 24–25). In general, it is not hard to fi nd objections to this either-or approach, even as the binary continues to be used now as much as ever. The next occasion for wondering about the term descriptivist came when I was grading usage assignments from a distance-learning class. Apparently, the lesson dedicated to defi ning prescriptivists and descriptivists uses this line, which is frequently quoted back to me: ‘Basically, the descriptivist describes what is happening in language, then sits back, lets it happen, and records it.’ Again, I was puzzled. How does one ‘sit back’ and ‘let language change happen’? And who records language for the sake of recording language? And how is that describing? These two stories capture two parts of the meaning of descriptivist. The first anecdote features the loyalty called forth in the term. By labeling oneself a descriptivist, one is naming the group one identifies with. The second anecdote features the activity encapsulated in the word. If one is a descriptivist, what does one do? Describe, obviously, but apparently for some people, describing means no more than letting language change happen and recording it. Both parts of the term descriptivism are present in the defi nition from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): (1a) The practice of describing the way a language is actually used, without prescribing rules or referring to norms of correctness; belief in or advocacy of such an approach. (s.v. ‘descriptivism’)

The first part of the defi nition focuses on the activity that is inherent in the root of the word – descriptivism involves describing in some way, although the nature of that describing requires a much fuller discussion. The second part of the defi nition focuses on the loyalty to the approach, which is inherent in the suffi x -ism or -ist. Under -ist, the OED explicitly connects -ist with -ism and an emphasis on ideology: (1b) Designating an adherent or professor of some creed, doctrine, system, or art, which is usually designated by a cognate -ism: e.g. altruist (a professor of altruism) (s.v. ‘–ist’ 3.a.)

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As we might expect with such a suffi x, the commitment to an ideological position is one of the strongest senses of descriptivism and descriptivist, although that ideological position is seldom precisely defi ned and varies widely in the use of these terms, as this chapter will discuss. To get a more precise idea of the contrasts in activity and ideology associated with descriptivism, I have searched for descriptivist and descriptivism in Google Books (Davies, 2011–), NOW (Davies, 2013a), COCA (Davies, 2008–) and GloWbE (Davies, 2013b). I have also examined assorted linguistic textbooks and usage guides, which often defi ne prescriptivism and descriptivism. From those uses, I have noted various shades of meaning that I give below. Not surprisingly, some of the sharpest examples of the various senses come from polemical, or at least apologetic, writing. For that reason, a few sources, especially Bryan Garner, who is arguably the most outspoken champion of the prescriptivist position today, predominate in the quotations below. But even when a given use is not as sharply illustrative, it often reflects an implicit assumption agreeing with the particular characterization being discussed. 1.1 Descriptivism as a contrastive term

One of the first things that becomes apparent from examining the use of descriptivism or descriptivist in various corpora and linguistic textbooks is that they are primarily contrastive terms to prescriptivism or prescriptivist. That is how they are used, for example, when writers occasionally frame the two -isms as a contest, as in both of these examples: (2a) Whenever describers and prescribers of the English language meet, they don’t exchange views in balanced and civil discussion. They fight. (Fairman, 2002: 57) (2b) The spot where, like a pair of weirdly-named opponents from Gulliver’s Travels, the Descriptivists do battle with the Prescriptivists. (Elmes, 2015: 3)

These quotations capture the opposition concisely, if perhaps hyperbolically. The trope of war or battle they employ is fairly common, as seen in such titles as The Fight for English (Crystal, 2007), The Language Wars (Hitchings, 2011), Grammar Wars: Language as a Cultural Battlefield in 17th and 18th Century England (Mitchell, 2001) and ‘Making peace in the language wars’ (Garner, 2003). Tellingly, the quotations in both 2a and 2b use the reductive style of polemical writing, but not to dismiss one of the poles of the binary (such as prescriptivism) but the binary itself. In 2b, especially, the wryly drawn caricature, with its allusions to the big-endians and little-endians in Gulliver’s Travels, is set up so that the author can dismiss the binary, giving us another instance of resistance to that binary. Such polemical uses of descriptivist clearly illustrate the opposition implicit in nearly all uses of descriptivist or descriptivism. Fundamentally,

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descriptivists are ‘not prescriptivists’. Yet this basic notion is applied in a variety of ways to both the activity and the ideology of descriptivism. The extent of this variety reflects the multitude of competing values that people hold concerning language – values that are so complex and varied that we should not be surprised that the binary of ‘prescriptivism vs descriptivism’ cannot cover them all. And indeed, the discussions from which the quotations below are taken often reflect an awareness of the insufficiency of that binary. In quoting the discussions piecemeal as I do, I do not wish to imply that all quoted writers limit themselves to a binary view of the issues. Instead, I aim to illustrate that many complex activities, attitudes and relationships revolving around the study of language are effaced when we reduce them to the binary of ‘prescriptivism vs descriptivism’. One of the first clues that complexity is effaced comes from reducing various attitudes and loyalties to just two positions. Even the broad meaning of ‘not prescriptivist’ would, in principle, comprehend a large swath of territory, from merely not sharing prescriptivist assumptions (non-prescriptivist) to actively opposing those assumptions (anti-prescriptivist). Yet terms like fight and opponents suggest that the term usually focuses on the polar opposition to prescriptivism, to the exclusion of many different attitudes, stances and assumptions in between the extremes. The oppositional nature of the term and the strong link it has with the values of those holding contrasting positions leads to the contingent polysemy of this term. Susan Fitzmaurice has argued that polysemy is structured socially. … at any particular time, some meanings will be more relevant or prominent than others for certain speakers, and those prime meanings will depend upon affective factors such as the speaker’s social, temporal, experiential, and ideological stance. (Fitzmaurice, 2016: 175)

As this chapter will demonstrate, the meaning of descriptivism – its referential meaning, its denotation and its connotation – depends very much on the ideology of the person using the term. In rough terms, the term descriptivist when applied to others is usually negative and when applied to oneself is usually positive. The ways in which it is negative or positive are different enough from each other that it is a fair question whether either side understands the other side’s use of the term. The rest of this chapter will illustrate many different practices and attitudes that are encapsulated in the term descriptivist, depending on who uses the term. 2 Descriptivism and ‘Describing’: The Activity of Descriptivism

One way in which the meaning diverges is in the activity denoted by descriptivist. So what do descriptivists do? As a contrastive term, descriptivist would refer to those who study language in some way other than privileging correctness judgements, and for the most part, such

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non-prescriptivist ways of studying language are equated with modern linguistics, as the frequent collocation of descriptivist and linguist shows: (3) Excepting only in certain educational contexts, modern linguists utterly reject prescriptivism, and their investigations are based instead on descriptivism. (Trask, 1999: 69)1

An early move in linguistic instruction is to inform students that the goals, scope and methods of linguistic investigations extend far beyond questions of correctness, and a handy way to make that move is to use descriptivist to contrast with prescriptivist. 2.1 Goals of ‘describing’

On the surface, descriptivist would seem to be a poor choice of terminology. Linguists hardly ever use the term for themselves, except when it contrasts with prescriptivist. A quick search in the Google Books corpus shows that when the contrast is not present, the term descriptivist much more frequently refers to synchronic, structuralist linguistics in contrast to historical linguistics, as defi ned in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics: Used in the 1940s and 1950s in opposition to ‘historical’. ‘Descriptive linguistics’ was therefore another term, especially in the USA, for synchronic linguistics, and ‘descriptivists’ are scholars in the USA who saw that branch as primary. Also opposed to prescriptive and, rarely at that time but commonly in later attacks on the ‘descriptivists’, to ‘theoretical’ or ‘explanatory’. (Matthews, 2014: s.v. ‘descriptive’)

As this entry suggests, descriptivist in later use could well be a negative term to the extent that it suggests a lack of theoretical or explanatory sophistication. To a lesser extent, descriptivist is also used in philosophy of language discussions of reference (Williamson, 2006: s.v. ‘Reference’). We can see the inadequacy of descriptive/descriptivist/descriptivism for characterizing linguistic goals, scope and practice by the qualifications linguists attach to their use of the term. As the quotations taken from introductory textbooks show, when linguists use descriptivist for their own endeavors, they fi nd themselves amplifying or qualifying the term to note more precisely how and what they describe: (4a) Descriptive linguistics aims to understand the ways people use language in the world, given all of the forces that influence such use. (Friedrich & Diniz de Figueiredo, 2016: 4) (4b) Our rules are descriptive, not prescriptive; this means they describe regularities in the structure of language, they do not tell you what to do. (Kuiper & Allan, 2017: 7) (4c) A descriptivist avoids passing judgements and provides explanation and analysis. (Hitchings, 2011: 23)

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(4d) Such a model is a descriptive grammar. … It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand and make judgments about wellformedness, and it describes what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language. (Fromkin et al., 2011: 13, original bold emphasis)

In these defi nitions, what is being described ranges from how language is actually used to the basic linguistic knowledge native speakers have. Describe is not sufficient by itself in these quotations, since describing is only preliminary to explaining, understanding or analyzing. When linguists use the term descriptivist for themselves, it is largely as a metonym for their entire activity, which extends well beyond merely describing But it is not clear that non-linguists see the term as metonymic. As seen in my students’ comments, non-linguists often see describing as little more than sitting back and recording language. Bryan Garner also characterizes the descriptivists’ activity as recording. In an introduction that he has retained for all editions of his usage guide, Garner writes: (5) Descriptivists want to record language as it’s actually used, and they perform a useful function – though their audience is generally limited to those willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research. (Garner, 2016: xiv–xv)

Applying recording to linguists is puzzling, especially compared to the linguists’ description of their own activities. Of course some linguists document (often moribund) languages that have not been described, but their work involves much more than ‘recording’. And for a language as well-documented as English, the term recording is puzzling indeed. Characterizing the activity of linguists as recording is another way in which the binary effaces the terms, since linguists do much more than record language. 2 2.2 Scope of ‘describing’

The scope of what linguists analyze extends beyond prescriptive rules, as well. Linguists do not limit their analysis of language to only those usage items identified in usage handbooks, and assuming that they do leads to more confusion. In fact, most linguists are not very interested in studying correctness questions. But apparently that scope is not always appreciated by non-linguists, who may explain that descriptivists describe language as it is actually used, but mainly with respect to the variation contested in the codified prescriptive rules. Some remarks taken from newspapers, blogs and internet commenters illustrate such assumptions by non-specialists. (6a) Prescriptivism is inherently conservative. It errs on the side of caution, saying: That word you’re unsure about? Use it this way – the right way. Whereas descriptivism might say: Here is the evidence. These are the

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ways the word is used, how that has changed through history, and what different commentators say about it. The rest is up to you. (Carey, 2015) (6b) Crystal acknowledges the long polarization between descriptivists, who observe the way language usage is changing, and prescriptivists, who often lament those changes and insist on rules that buck current trends. (Clements, 2010) (6c) The descriptivist approach to language change is to simply describe the current usage and make a note of how language changes. (aggslanguage, 2017)

These quotations imply that descriptivists describe (or analyze) only the variation contested by prescriptive rules, as suggested by the emphasis on usage. If that is the scope of the describing, then the activity indeed seems misguided, as Garner has noted: (7) Even the ‘pure descriptivist’ has a dogmatic predilection against making judgments. That in itself is a bias – and a very odd one, in the eyes of ordinary people. (Garner, 2000: 5)

If all we want to know are the ‘correct’ forms of language, then it would be very odd to resist making judgements and instead insist on ‘describing’. Limiting the term descriptivist to only questions of correctness is another way in which the binary effaces all the other kinds of ‘describing’ that occur when linguists use descriptivist about their own activities.

2.3 Methods of ‘describing’

A third contrast can be seen in the methods used for linguistic analysis. Sometimes linguists do turn their analysis to usage items, so that their scope coincides with that of prescriptivists. Their methods, however, still contrast with those of prescriptivists. Rather than accepting the authority of usage guides, linguists might analyze usage items using more empirical methods. This notion is captured in the following comment on Language log: (8a) It’s unfortunate that the terms ‘descriptivist’ and ‘prescriptivist’ have come to be used as opposites (complements), since this suggests that describing and prescribing are incompatible. Perhaps the term ‘descriptivist’ should be dropped and replaced by ‘empiricist’. Descriptivists/empiricists think that pronouncements about language should be based on evidence, and not just on making stuff up (or citing an ‘authority’ who has made stuff up). (Liberman, 2012)

Here, the commenter notes that the two terms do not need to be exclusive of each other and argues that prescriptivist concerns can be studied with descriptivist or empirical methods. Jack Lynch, who has written extensively about the relationship between linguistics and prescriptivism, adds

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(in a quotation picked up in GloWbE) that linguistic methods should be applied even more rigorously than they usually are: (8b) I happen to know for a fact that God doesn’t care whether you split infi nitives. But some people do, and that’s a simple fact that no statistical table will change. A good descriptivist should tell you that. In fact, my beef with many descriptivists is that they don’t describe enough. A really thorough description of a word or usage would take into account not only how many people use it, but in what circumstances and to what effect. (Lynch, 2007: s.v. ‘Prescriptive versus Descriptive Grammars’)

In this use, descriptivism focuses on the ways in which linguistic methods might be applied to correctness issues. If judgments about correctness are formed by examining the language in context, using concepts or methods from linguistics, they are often deemed descriptivist. The following quotation illustrates such a use of descriptivist when responding to the contention that the word pornography is not necessarily connected to sex. (8c) I’d contend, from a descriptivist standpoint, that, used unmodified, the word ‘pornography’ always refers to sexual or erotic depictions (word, photo, or fi lm). You can add modifiers to the word ‘porn’ to give it a nonsexual sense (e.g. ‘food porn’ or ‘torture porn’), but this usage is rare with the word ‘pornography’. (mr_roboto, 2007)

In this instance, the term descriptivist is used to label an analysis of a word’s meaning that depends on its collocations and empirical distribution. Interestingly, the writer found his or her way to descriptivist and not empirical to capture this sense. This use of descriptivism to mean ‘using linguistic methods and concepts to analyze prescriptive rules’ appears to be increasingly popular. We need some word for addressing prescriptivist concerns by using linguistic methods, and this seems to be the most convenient. Linguists use it themselves, as seen in ‘descriptive about prescriptivism’ (Brewer, 2018), and ‘a descriptive account of prescriptivism’ (Curzan, 2014: 12) and Describing Prescriptivism (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2020). This may be the clearest instance of convergence on the meaning of descriptivism or descriptivist between linguists and non-linguists or, more to the point, between those who use it for themselves and those who use it for others. 2.4 Contingent polysemy of ‘describing’

For most other uses of the word to refer to the action or scope of describing, descriptivist is used and valorized differently depending on the frame of reference. For non-linguists, descriptivist likely means ‘describing’ language as it is actually used only with regard to codified correctness issues. A descriptivist so defi ned may well be foolishly misguided. For a linguist, on the other hand, for whom descriptivist is used metonymically to refer to all their study of language, a descriptivist has far more advanced

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vistas and tools of investigation. From this perspective, those who want to limit themselves to questions of correctness and to outdated or facile methods of analyzing language are the ones with the misguided view of language. As self-evidently wrongheaded the activity of linguists may appear to non-linguists, that activity may seem just as self-evidently superior to linguists – and a large reason for that difference is that the two groups are not even referring to the same goals, scope and sometimes method when they use the term descriptivist. Thus, this contingent polysemy of the word effaces a fair amount of meaning about the activity referred to by the term descriptivist.

3 Descriptivism and -isms: The Ideology Denoted by Descriptivism

Even more is effaced when descriptivist is used to refer to the loyalty or ideology of those who are ‘not prescriptivist’. We can see the degree to which descriptivist refers to an ideology instead of an activity in those frequent uses that are devoid of reference to any activity, as in the following: (9a) After primly resisting the onslaught of American common usage on looks like, the BBC goes squishily descriptive on beginning sentences with conjunctions. (OED: s.v. ‘descriptive’)

The OED extracted this use of descriptive from a column by William Safire, a well-known apologist for prescriptivism. In this passage, Safi re does not point to anything the BBC is doing that resembles describing per se; instead, the BBC is apparently slacking in its commitment to uphold usage-guide standards in the face of popular usage. We see the same emphasis on loyalty in the quandary expressed by this blog commenter: (9b) Is the phrase ‘needs replaced’ an English language regionalism? … The shortened phrase … seems … like an improper way to use ‘needs.’ (I know … I try to be all descriptivist about these things, but a man’s not perfect.) (OmieWise, 2010)

In this passage there is no describing implied by trying to be ‘all descriptivist’ – it is more an admission that the person fi nds himself unwilling to forego correctness judgements (implied in improper) which are the hallmark of prescriptivists. What we see with these quotations is that the only ‘activity’ necessary to be called a descriptivist is a reluctance to prescribe or to accept the pronouncements of those who prescribe. This is more an indicator of relative loyalty than of activity. A descriptivist, then, does not share the same attitudes towards correctness as a prescriptivist. But just what attitudes or principles do the descriptivists reject? As we might expect, the ways in which descriptivists reject the attitudes of prescriptivists go well beyond the simple binary, and for showing the

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polysemy of descriptivism it is useful to show several of the different attitudes that make up this complex. The quotations from my searches cohere into six groups, which are given in Example 10 below. Each item represents attitudes of prescriptivism that descriptivism is said to ignore or oppose. The fi rst three revolve around assumptions about how language works, while the last three treat attitudes towards the importance of the prescriptive rules and can be seen as the ideological counterpart to the goals, scope and methods discussed in Section 2 above. (10a) Proscribed forms, and variation more generally, are errors. (10b) Standard English is superior to all other varieties of English. (10c) Prescribed variants and Standard English are important for communication. (10d) Learning correct forms is the most important (or at least an important) reason for studying language. (10e) The prescriptivist tradition is well-founded and should be respected. (10f) Correctness should be promoted and fostered.

That there are at least six different contested positions shows yet again how the simple binary of prescriptivism vs descriptivism effaces the complexity of language prescription. The difficulty of formulating those positions in ways that would be fair to adherents should illustrate even more complexity. As with any polemic, there will be strong formulations of claims and more moderate ones. The formulations above tend to be on the strong side, although it is possible to formulate some of them even more strongly, such as claiming that Standard English is the only form of English. The goal of the formulation is to represent a cluster of assumptions, which certainly vary in their degree of strength. And while the extreme form of any position is often used to construct a strawman argument – and there have been many strawman arguments created in the prescriptivist vs descriptivist discussions – I have tried to recognize a range of formulations. I recognize that prescriptivists and descriptivists/linguists are all individuals, and that their opinions will vary, but I would hope that most people’s attitudes will fit somewhere within the range I provide. When I (perhaps presumptuously) speak for linguists, I try to frame my analysis within common practice and principles in linguistics. Above all, I hope that the discussion of each group below will bring out some of the complexity even among adherents (or opponents) of these positions – complexity that is effaced by the binary prescriptivist vs descriptivist. 3.1 Attitudes towards language 3.1.1 Proscribed forms, and variation more generally, are errors

One of the most common ways in which descriptivists are said to depart from prescriptivists is in their attitudes towards ‘error’. Descriptivists are said not to accept that errors are possible, and in these characterizations ‘error’ is probably most often understood as using the proscribed form. The

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notion of error is particularly important for Garner, who mentions it in his various prefaces and in this exchange with Robert Lane Greene: (11a) It sounds like wishful thinking when you say that ‘no real-world descriptivist’ still accepts the dogma that a native speaker can’t make a mistake. (Garner & Greene, 2012)

The contest over ‘error’ continues at popular levels as well, as seen in internet comments. The first comment explicitly notes, while the second implicitly assumes, that descriptivists do not believe in errors: (11b) I call myself a ‘flexiptivist’. The name may be new, but I believe the stance is far from unusual. Or I should say it’s not unusual among socalled descriptivists: that is, the linguists and others who are philosophically and temperamentally opposed to bashing usage or grammar mistakes, or even to using the word ‘mistakes’. (Yagoda, 2012) (11c) Now, a lot of folks will roll their eyes at the notion of grammatical descriptivism, saying that’s how we end up with words like ‘irregardless’. (Davis, 2016)

In these quotations, descriptivists are accused of not accepting the idea that errors exist. Of course, the point at issue here is how one defines ‘error’. A common assumption among prescriptivists is that proscribed forms are ipso facto errors, but linguists might well take issue with this assumption and instead frame proscribed forms in variationist terms. Saying that proscribed forms are errors essentially claims that variation can be wrong or the result of mistakes, and the ‘error’ terminology really aims to suppress variation. 3 One reason why linguists are apparently uncomfortable with the notion of error is that it is a fruitless way of discussing variation. Over and over, linguists (especially sociolinguists) have shown that many other factors are more important in accounting for variation. If linguists really believed that speakers choose one variant instead of another because they make mistakes, we wouldn’t make much progress in finding the real factors that account for variation. We might not have investigated most of the variation that occurs in language or even the nature of variation itself. A related problem is evaluating what the variation indexes. The term error implies that the person who uses a proscribed form like a double negative is the kind of person who makes mistakes, and a common assumption in prescriptivist discourse is that people who use proscribed variants are less intelligent, less careful, less disciplined, less educated or otherwise less capable than those who do not use those forms. Sometimes, the refusal to accept these indexing assumptions is what descriptivists are said to oppose, as in this quotation: (12) What a descriptivist – this descriptivist, anyhow – won’t do is grant that people who don’t know or can’t master certain styles of language use are inferior beings, and those who can are superior, decent people. (Mitchel, 2012)

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Ascribing inferior qualities to people who use proscribed forms presents difficulties for linguists. As we know from sociolinguistics studies, variation of all kinds, including variation with constructions codified in prescriptive rules, much more readily indexes a person’s social background. Put simply, the experience of linguists with variation in language is simply too extensive for them to accept at face value the indexing of negative qualities that is assigned to the use of proscribed variants. The differing valuation of variation constitutes another example of the contingent polysemy in the term descriptivism. Those who apply the term descriptivist to others may well see the use of proscribed forms as errors which demonstrate some inferior quality of the speaker or writer using them. From such a perspective, it must seem strange, perhaps even perverse, that anyone would claim that people don’t make errors, because it is readily demonstrable that people do use proscribed forms. If people didn’t use proscribed forms, there would be no need for prescriptivists to try to suppress those forms. On the fl ip side, those who apply the term descriptivist to themselves may be baffled that a prescriptivist would want to account for variation with error when so many other variables better account for it. The descriptivist may even see latent prejudice against certain groups, since group membership is what variation indexes best. The contingent polysemy is that the descriptivists’ resistance to an ‘error’ model of variation appears to be an affront to common sense for those who use descriptivists to refer to others, but to those who use it for themselves, the term appears to be a mark of superior sense and better understanding of language. 3.1.2 Standard English is superior to all other varieties of English

This next assumption transposes the ‘one right variant’ attitude to ‘one right variety’. This cluster of assumptions can be formulated in varying degrees of strength, starting with the strongest – that there is just one English language and proscribed forms are not part of it – and descending in degrees of strength, such as that Standard English is the only important, or perhaps the most important or simply an important, variety of English. Some quotations that impute descriptivist opposition (or at least non-acceptance) of these positions are given in Example 13. The remarks come from linguists who apprehend the attitudes towards Standard English in terms of language varieties. Geoffrey Nunberg, who has written extensively on prescriptivism, shrewdly observes that part of the opposition to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary likely derived from a reified view of English4: (13a) Since the time of Webster’s Third, people have been framing usage issues as a pseudo-philosophical dispute between ‘descriptivist’ and ‘prescriptivist’ views of language, the one telling it like it is and the other telling it like it ought to be. But actually all dictionaries are in the business

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of describing the language as it is. What really changes is the conception of the language itself. Back in Macdonald’s era, it was still just possible to think of the English language as a single great stream with its sources in literary tradition, rolling majestically past the evanescent slang and jargon scattered on its banks. (Nunberg, 2012)

Here, Nunberg posits the conception of language itself as a key contrast between prescriptivists and descriptivists, where descriptivists are presumably less willing to accept the notion that there is just one kind of English. This theme is also sounded in a discussion by Tom McArthur, a linguist well known for writing about the immense variety in English (again, in a quotation swept up in the Google Books corpus): (13b) Currently, for example, many teachers of English have for several decades been employing elements of the traditional unitary, prescriptivist model of Standard English alongside elements of a more recent multiple, descriptivist model. (McArthur, 1998: 80)

Over time, it appears that prescriptivist discourse has become more accustomed to including considerations of language varieties in their discourse (Chapman, 2019; van der Meulen, this volume), so that the strong formulation of these assumptions – that there is just one form of English and proscribed forms are therefore not part of English – is probably decreasing in frequency and saliency. Yet descriptivists are said to oppose even the much weaker formulation that Standard English remains an important variety of English. This attitude is behind the frequent ‘gotcha’ argument that linguists themselves use Standard English. How could linguists insist that Standard English is not important, yet use it themselves, seems to be the thinking. Several have used versions of this argument (e.g. Honey, 1997: 43), and Garner mentions it often, as he does in this English Today debate: (14) They write by all the rules that they tell everyone else not to worry about. Despite their protestations, their actions show that correctness is to be valued. (Garner, 2000: 5)

So, within this range of attitudes towards Standard English, which would linguists indeed oppose? The strongest formulation – that Standard English is the only form of English – would be unacceptable to nearly all linguists: we have too much experience with language to pretend that nonstandard varieties are not English. For similar reasons, linguists would probably be hesitant to list Standard English as the only important or even the most important dialect; they would probably be hesitant to rank any variety as most important. Such a ranking would at the very least depend on the criteria used for ranking. If those criteria included the dialect used for wider communication, then linguists would probably rate Standard English as very important. As academics, linguists routinely use Standard English in all their published writings; of course Standard English is valuable as a language of education and wider communication for these

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purposes, though Geneva Smitherman has also used AAVE for academic purposes throughout her work, most notably in a series of English Journal columns (1973–1976). The safest formulation for a linguist would be that Standard English is an important variety for many domains, like education or business, but other varieties are also important for other functions, such as making friends, associating with family, and so on. The polysemy regarding this issue is contingent upon how strongly people formulate the prescriptivist notion of Standard English. For those prescriptivists who think Standard English is the only form of English, or at least the only form worth recognizing, the resistance from linguists must appear iconoclastic or antinomian. The resistance to the strong formulations of these attitudes may well suggest to prescriptivists that linguists don’t value Standard English. The use of the term descriptivist, in this sense, is bound up with notions of permissiveness. On the fl ip side, those who would apply descriptivists to themselves may well see themselves as more sophisticated and realistic in their understanding of the composition of English from a range of varieties. They may also see themselves as more tolerant towards non-standard speakers and less fettered by an unrealistic appraisal of how language works. 3.1.3 Prescribed variants and Standard English are important for communication

This set of assumptions builds on the fi rst two sets by giving reasons for valuing prescribed over proscribed forms: it is important to communicate with precision and elegance, and somehow prescriptive rules help with both. The strong formulation of this assumption would be that the prescriptive rules ensure precise and elegant communication, while the statement can be hedged to varying degrees, such as claiming that the prescriptive rules may be necessary, but perhaps not sufficient for ensuring precision and elegance. A weaker formulation is that the prescriptive rules somehow contribute to precise and elegant communication. The following quotation uses a fairly strong formulation, and explicitly contrasts it with a descriptivist position: (15a) To sum it up very broadly: there’s a spectrum of thought about dictionaries and grammar. Descriptivists think dictionaries and grammar rules should reflect the language that people use irl [in real life], while prescriptivists hold that strict rules on usage are necessary for the purposes of sense-making. (Smith, 2015)

This position is elaborated in a long comment to a newspaper article on ‘begging the question’: (15b) But neither am I (any more) a strict Descriptivist, as you seem to be. There is something useful to be said about how to use language beyond the results of a survey of how it currently is used. You seem to interpret the linguistic slogan ‘Meaning is Use’ as ‘Meaning is Usage’. I prefer

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‘Meaning is Usefulness’. You can’t just ignore usage, but you can argue for practices that increase the language’s usefulness in expressing ideas clearly, and against changes that would decrease it. (kgbgb, 2010)

A major difficulty for linguists with this set of assumptions would be that the assumptions are empirical claims themselves that can be tested. It might be difficult to prove these claims, but in principle one could defi ne clear or elegant writing somehow and then measure the degree to which the prescribed forms contribute to and the proscribed forms detract from this good writing. As long as this were done in a non-circular way, so that good writing weren’t simply defi ned by the absence of proscribed forms, there would be no greater reason to resist these claims than any other empirical claims. It all depends on how well one can make the case for the claims. Unlike the fi rst two groups of assumptions, there are no fundamental principles involved that would conflict with the study of linguistics – except for the principle, perhaps, that linguistic claims must be demonstrated and that they are always open to challenge. It is very likely that whatever degree of resistance comes from linguists on this count owes more to the lack of substantiation of these claims. In fact, at face value, the claim that the rules improve communication looks suspect. On the surface, I don’t see that ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ is any harder to understand than ‘I can’t get any satisfaction.’ Still less do I see any greater difficulty in understanding ‘I was feeling nauseous’ instead of ‘I was feeling nauseated.’ Of course, there will likely be some proscribed forms that slow our reading down, lead to greater ambiguity or make writing clunky in some way, and studies demonstrating the importance of those forms would be welcome. My point, however, is that at face value it is hard to prove the superiority of many (I suspect most) of the prescriptive rules for communicating. Again, the prescriptivist vs descriptivist binary effaces the complexity of these assumptions, and the gravity towards the poles leads to contingent polysemy. If a person believes that the prescriptive rules defi ne good writing, or that they are at least necessary and possibly sufficient for good writing, then a resistance to prescriptive rules is seen as a resistance to good writing. If linguists only describe how language is actually used, what room is left for discriminating between good and bad writing? Descriptivists in this sense are certainly not promoting good writing, and they may be impeding it. On the flip side, equating good writing with following the rules looks unsupported, if not foolish. Resisting this formulation allows one to look for the real factors of good writing. More importantly, it allows the descriptivist to avoid the circularity of defi ning good writing as writing free from proscribed forms, and then championing the prescriptive rules because they produce good writing. What is effaced by the binary is that one may support good writing, without accepting all rules.

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3.2 Attitudes towards prescriptivist practice

These next three items treat attitudes towards the importance of the rules, and to a degree they shade into each other, but they can be characterized as the importance of learning the rules, the importance of trusting usage pronouncements and the importance of promoting the tradition. In some ways, they are the ideological counterparts of the goals, scope and methods given in Section 2. 3.2.1 Learning correct forms is the most important (or at least an important) reason for studying language

This next group of assumptions focuses on how language should be studied. The prescriptivist assumption is that if prescribed forms are important, it would be important for people to study and learn them. The strongest formulation of this assumption would be that knowing correct language is the only reason to study language, but this statement could be hedged by saying that, while knowing correctness may not be the only reason to study language, it is the most important reason, or at least an important reason, or at least a legitimate reason. A descriptivist is characterized as taking issue with at least some of these assumptions, as manifest in the following quotations from linguists trying to defi ne their own approach to language: (16a) In a descriptivist approach, we try to describe the facts of linguistic behaviour exactly as we fi nd them, and we refrain from making value judgments about the speech of native speakers. (Trask, 1999: 69) (16b) This is called descriptive grammar, and has nothing to do with the rather surreal notion of telling people what they should say. The other grammar, which is about counterintuitive, party-pooping bizzarerie, … is called prescriptive grammar and is neither taught to nor discussed by linguists, except as the persistent little scourge that seems to have gotten hold of the Anglophone world. (McWhorter, 1998: 62)

These two quotations privilege a linguistic approach to language over the one that focuses on correctness. In fact, they exclude prescriptivist methods and aims from being parts of linguistics. Garner, defi ning descriptivists from the other direction, resents descriptivists for not recognizing the legitimacy of the prescriptivist approach to language: (16c) Of course, I’m happy to let the linguists do their thing. But they shouldn’t dogmatize against those who deal with the practical daily problems of English usage. (Garner, 2000: 6)

As we might expect with this issue as well, the ground that is most effaced by the binary prescriptivist vs descriptivist is the middle. The extreme position – knowing correct language is the only reason to study language – cannot be accepted by linguists, since their field depends on studying language for other reasons. Even claiming that knowing correctness is the

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most important reason for studying language would be hard for a linguist to accept. The main point of Examples 16a and 16b is that studying language only through a lens of correctness is not linguistics. Aims and methods of linguistics go well beyond questions of correctness and often never include such questions. The opposition to prescriptivism in this case constitutes a contest over how language should be studied. The contingent polysemy found here is very similar to that already discussed regarding the scope of ‘describing’. If one assumes that the main reason for studying language is to know the correct forms, then the refusal to recognize correctness as the highest priority, or even as a priority at all, makes descriptivists look iconoclastic. For linguists, the study of correctness is often seen as a fairly sterile endeavor; with a phenomenon as complex and rich and multifaceted as language, how could one be content with focusing on a limited view of language that consists mainly of passing along received wisdom? If the only questions about language were correctness questions, linguists would not make much progress in understanding how language works. Attitudes towards the value of learning prescriptive rules will vary from linguist to linguist, but all linguists will acknowledge the necessity of their being able to study language without regard to correctness, so at least that much resistance to the hegemony of correctness is necessary. 3.2.2 The prescriptivist tradition is well-founded and should be respected

A major assumption within prescriptivist discourse is that the prescriptivist rules – at least some of them, although the discourse is not always forthcoming in telling us which – have a strong basis for being promoted. Usage guide writers can tell which rules are important, so their authority should be acknowledged. But, as discussed in Subsection 2.3, linguists will usually prefer their own methods of analyzing language and perhaps dismiss the authority of prescriptive pronouncements that rely mainly on tradition. Again, there are varying ways these assumptions are expressed. It could be that all or most or some prescriptivists (writers of usage handbooks, editors, teachers or general complainers) are authorities on language (or at least this aspect of language). As such, all or most or some of the rules that they promote are sound, as are the justifications for following them. Thus, all or most or some of the prescriptivist rules are important to follow. These assumptions all have to do with the authority behind prescriptivist pronouncements. Challenges from linguists would not necessarily recognize that authority, whether applied to people, handbooks or the rules themselves. Once again, Garner memorably expresses the ‘descriptivist’ resistance to the authority of prescriptivists and prescriptivism: (17) WDEU treats Fowler and all other predecessors as linguistic dimwits … a slackly permissive book, WDEU consistently denigrates the judgments made by Fowler, Bernstein, Follett, and many others. (Garner, 2000: 7)

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Here, Garner takes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage to task for not respecting the authority or expertise of his prescriptivist predecessors. Appeals to authority are one of the chief sources of evidence in prescriptivist writing (Algeo, 1991; Cameron, 1995: 33; Peters & Young, 1997: 31), so it is not surprising that Garner would be irked by linguists’ lack of respect for such appeals. In fact, Garner’s complaint is itself an appeal to authority, since he gives linguists no other reasons to respect the prescriptivists that he names. But appeals to authority are not seen as useful in linguistics, where advancement in our understanding of language has come from testing and demonstrating claims. Since the methods used to make correctness pronouncements are not typical of linguistics, linguists might well be less accepting of correctness claims. The following quotation makes the rejection of prescribers’ authority explicit: (18) I am loath to be identified with, say, Clark Elder Morrow, whose uninformed railings against the OED are just sad; or David Bentley Hart, who has argued (I am not making this up, you know) that prescriptivism is morally superior to descriptivism; or Mark Halpern, who is writing admiringly in the Vocabula Review about Dwight Macdonald’s attacks on Webster’s Third, evidently unaware that the battle was lost half a century ago and that Macdonald’s fulminations merely look hilarious today. So please do not number me among that gaggle of self-named paragons of civilization peddling what Henry Hitchings calls in The Language Wars ‘bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffl ing abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance’. (McIntyre, 2012)

For someone who applies the term descriptivist to others, this rejection of authority may be seen as the rejection of the value of Standard English, or at least of precise or elegant writing. If one assumes that the rules are wellsupported, this kind of resistance looks iconoclastic. The flip side is that if the methods used for valorizing prescribed forms are suspect, we might also suspect the validity of the pronouncements. But what is lost by a binary opposition is that a descriptivist could presumably accept assumptions about a given rule’s importance, if those assumptions are demonstrated, and still have room to dismiss those rules that are not justified. Just because a form is said to be proscribed does not mean that it really is not part of Standard English and should be avoided. A linguist can well accept some defi nition of Standard English and still challenge the authority underlying a given prescriptive rule. In fact, to a linguist, the responsible way to approach questions of correctness would be to evaluate them with sound methods, not to merely accept the authority of the tradition. 3.2.3 Correctness should be promoted and fostered

With all the good consequences assumed to result from the use of prescribed forms, it is not surprising to see a set of assumptions that

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correctness should be fostered, inculcated, enforced, taught or otherwise promoted. Again, these assumptions may be formulated with varying degrees of strength. They might emphasize an individual’s responsibility merely to use prescribed forms in order to legitimize prescriptive practice, but they might also extend to the importance of teaching correct forms, fostering a commitment to use prescribed forms or enforcing the use of prescribed forms. These assumptions might regard social judgements about correctness to be salutary and maybe even necessary. One way in which descriptivists are portrayed as opposing these assumptions comes from the ‘leave your language alone’ attitude often attributed to them. This is what Nunberg refers to in the following quotation: (19a) Mark Halpern’s defense of usage orthodoxies (‘A War That Never Ends’, March, Atlantic) offers my own Atlantic article (‘The Decline of Grammar’, December, 1983) as a paradigm of ‘leave-your-languagealone’ descriptivism. (Nunberg, 1997)

Garner keeps a list of quotations showing such leave-your-language-alone claims, which he brings up from time to time to show that descriptivists are still subverting the work of prescriptivists, as he does in the latest edition of his usage guide: (19b) A dictionary or grammar is not as good an authority for your speech as the way you yourself speak. (Hall, 1950: 6, quoted in Garner, 2016: xliv) (19c) For change that comes spontaneously from below, or within, our policy should be, ‘let your language alone, and leave its speakers alone!’ (Lakoff, 1990: 298, quoted in Garner, 2016: xxxv)

This insistence on leaving one’s language alone in the face of the prescriptivist endeavor is often seen as making it harder to teach students good English, and complaints about descriptivist interference in education are another way in which these assumptions about descriptivists are expressed. The following blog comment captures that sentiment, quoting someone else: (20) ‘The M-W machine has contributed to the inability of school children in America to differentiate between good and bad grammar.’ So I guess you were one of the people who called the 3rd edition of M-W’s dictionary in 1961 ‘bolshevist’ and a ‘political pamphlet’ for being descriptivist? (GloWbE, ‘Grammar Girl’)5

Of course, much of the importance of promoting prescriptive rules depends on how much one accepts the benefits claimed for prescriptivist rules in Section 3.1 and the soundness of the arguments made for them as discussed in Section 3.2. If one believes that correct forms are good, one would more readily see the promotion of correct forms as salutary and useful. Comments also emphasize the social benefits or drawbacks of prescriptive practice. Those who would apply the term descriptivist to others

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probably see their own efforts as a service – especially to those whose native dialects are fairly distant from Standard English. They emphasize the social mobility that comes from learning prescriptive rules. If Standard English can be defi ned and taught, then speakers from stigmatized varieties can learn it and obtain equal footing with other standard speakers (Garner & Rubin, 1986: 46; Marlow & Giles, 2010: 238). Teaching the forms of Standard English is seen as a way for others to acquire linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1992). Resistance to this motivation would look uncharitable. If descriptivists can use Standard English, why would they not want others to learn it? On the flip side, if one does not agree with the claims – especially the extreme claims – of prescriptivism, then it would not be valuable to promote correctness. The case for social mobility is not watertight, and those who call themselves descriptivists might be more disposed to notice the weaknesses. First, most of the ‘rules’ do not really defi ne Standard English, so the teaching and promotion of certain prescribed forms over certain proscribed forms may not accrue the values claimed for using Standard English. Promoting some of the rules may do little more than induce needless anxiety in those who haven’t learned ‘the rules’, and justify the selfregard of those who have learned those rules. In other words, the linguistic capital claimed for numerous rules simply isn’t as valuable as claimed. And even for those rules that really do separate Standard from nonstandard English (e.g. ‘he brung’, ‘we was’, double negatives), where the value of the linguistic capital is easier to demonstrate, prescriptive practice may reinforce the social distinctions as much as bridge them. The linguistic capital of using Standard English depends on difference and an economics of scarcity (Bourdieu, 1992: 54). The social benefits of using prescribed forms sanctioned as Standard English depend on some groups of people using forms that are not so sanctioned. Promoting ‘correct’ forms may also promote the social differences. Furthermore, the indexical value of the prescribed and proscribed forms may not be as simple as champions of prescriptivism suggest. The social indexing of nonstandard forms is complex, but it is safe to say that one of the chief indexical values of proscribed forms is the class that people belong to. Since the ‘prescribed’ forms nearly always coincide with the variety of English already spoken by the powerful segments of society, it is hard not to notice that the stigmatization of proscribed forms may well be stigmatization of other social classes. Denigration of proscribed forms can easily become a proxy for denigrating certain social classes (Armstrong & Mackenzie, 2013: 5; Milroy & Milroy, 1999: 2, 84). From this perspective, it would be uncharitable to label speakers of a different class as less intelligent for not following the rules. Perhaps the stigma thought to be attached to proscribed forms would be lower if such objections to proscribed forms weren’t taught and sanctioned by institutions like schools. In short, a descriptivist might see the promotion of prescriptive rules as more harmful than beneficial.

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The contingent polysemy comes from seeing descriptivists as uncharitable and unhelpful when the label is used for others, but as both charitable and helpful when it is used for oneself. The meaning effaced by a polarized approach to this assumption is that one must completely support or completely oppose the assumptions and practices of the prescriptivist tradition, while in actuality a person might move among many attitudes in between.6 4 Conclusion

This chapter set out to argue that the terms descriptivist and descriptivism actually cover many attitudes and practices, but that the emphasis on a binary opposition effaces much of the complexity in these attitudes and practices. The enumeration of the groups of assumptions and the range of opinions within each group was meant to demonstrate such complexity. Along the way, we have seen a common pattern: the opposition imputed to descriptivists is often grounded on an extreme position (where the imputed opposition is probably most accurate) and then assumed for a more moderate position (where the imputed opposition is probably less accurate). The extreme position that Standard English is the only worthwhile variety of English, for example, will likely be unacceptable to descriptivists. But the weaker formulation that Standard English is an important variety could be acceptable. Similarly, the extreme position that following all the prescriptive rules is necessary for good writing would be unacceptable, while a more moderate position that some rules may indeed help improve writing might be more acceptable if the value is demonstrated. But focusing only on the extreme position makes it appear that the two ‘camps’ differ completely from each other. The seemingly large difference between the camps comes from assuming that the descriptivists’ resistance to the strongest formulation applies equally to all other formulations. An extreme position is allowed to stand for a moderate position, so that the moderate position – where there may be much less opposition – is effaced by the binary. In pointing out that the middle ground is often lost, I am not so much trying to negotiate a truce as to reveal the polysemy of the term descriptivism. This word has many different denotations and connotations that depend on one’s ideological position, and misunderstandings arise from using the same word to cover quite different positions. The territory covered by ‘not prescriptivism’ is quite extensive, and by assuming an eitheror approach characterized by extreme positions, we end up effacing much in the middle and making interpretations harder. In a way, it is a shame that one word, descriptivism, must cover so much territory, but we probably cannot jettison the word, since the term prescriptivism itself encompasses a number of attitudes, practices and values, and we still need some term to contrast with prescriptivism in all its complexity. We need a quick

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way to signal that a linguist is not studying language with an emphasis on correctness, whether a linguist is studying some other aspect of language, isn’t making correctness judgements, doesn’t accept the authority of correctness judgements, or privileges actual usage over tradition in making correctness judgements. At the same time, we may need a word that signals that some people actually oppose those enterprises, as well. Some linguists may think the whole prescriptive enterprise is misguided, that the statements are overreaching or that particular pronouncements are inaccurate and poorly supported. We need a word for that stance as well. Currently, descriptivist is the handiest word for all of these stances and activities, and because it has such range it will continue to be used. It is not surprising that it would have that range, as it is used in a domain full of contrasting values. My concern in this chapter is not that descriptivist has polysemy – or even contingent polysemy – but instead that the polysemy is not recognized enough. The term is used for a wide variety of senses but is epitomized as merely a contrastive term in a simple binary. At least when discussing prescriptivism, perhaps we can be more careful to identify what parts of prescriptivism we wish to contrast. As long as we recognize that descriptivism may not mean the same thing to everyone, we might be able to use it more effectively. Since we apparently need a word to characterize the values of those who do not necessarily accept the assumptions of prescriptivism, I suppose it is good that our term at least rhymes. Notes (1) Unless otherwise noted, all bold typeface emphasis has been added to the quotations in this chapter. (2) The term recording makes more sense when it is applied to lexicographers, as they regularly use recording for their own methods: ‘After all, as lexicographers we would consider the role of dictionaries to be scrupulously descriptive. We are in the business of recording the language, as it is spoken’ (McPherson, 2011). (3) Milroy and Milroy (1999: 22) have famously noted that one characteristic of standardization is ‘intolerance of optional variability in language.’ (4) As Nunberg notes, the opposition is more generally couched in terms of what a dictionary should do. Regardless of how a dictionary is created, once published, it will likely be used as an authority for prescribing how a language should be used. As Joseph notes in this volume, prescriptivism lies in the use of a description, not the creation of it. (5) The GloWbE reference is to http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/which-versusthat.aspx, but when accessed on 11 October 2018, the website no longer contained these comments. (6) Calibrating the social value of promoting prescriptive rules is difficult, not least because the actual indexing of prescribed and proscribed forms is more complicated than either pole provides. To be sure, a speaker’s native dialect is frequently indexed by the speaker’s variants, but so too are the varieties that a speaker fi nds important and thus acquires. Whatever else the use of prescribed variants tells us, it shows that the speaker knows the variants and values using them. To the degree that particular prescribed variants are taught in school, the use of prescribed variants may indicate

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those who have access to and value education. The access and importance of education for a speaker can likewise serve as a proxy for those who are in fact educated, and education can serve as a proxy for intelligence or at least competence. The use of prescribed vs proscribed variants can go beyond identifying the social class of a speaker: through a series of proxies, the use of certain prescribed variants can give a fairly decent approximation of a person’s professional status (see Chapman, 2012).

References aggslanguage (2017) The impact of political correctness on language change. Linguisticus blog post, 17 March. See https://linguisticus.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/the-impactof-political-correctness-on-language-change/ (accessed 6 March 2018). Algeo, J. (1991) Sweet are the usages of diversity. Word 42, 1–17. Armstrong, N. and Mackenzie, I.E. (2013) Standardization, Ideology and Linguistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Battistella, E.L. (2005) Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1992) Language and Symbolic Power (ed. J.B. Thompson; trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson). Cambridge: Polity Press. Brewer, C. (2018) Setting a standard: Authors and sources in the OED. In L. Pillière, W. Andrieu, V. Kerfelec and D. Lewis (eds) Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language (pp. 127–143).Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. Carey, S. (2015) Reconciling descriptivism with editing. Sentence First: An Irishman’s blog about the English language blog post, 10 November. See https://stancarey.word press.com/2015/11/10/reconciling-descriptivism-with-editing/ (accessed 6 March 2018). Chapman, D. (2012) You say nucular; I say yourstupid: Popular prescriptivism in the politics of the United States. In C. Percy and M.C. Davidson (eds) The Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms (pp. 192–207). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Chapman, D. (2019) ‘Splendidly prejudiced’: Words for disapproval in English usage books. In B. Bös and C. Claridge (eds) Norms and Conventions in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Clements, W. (2010) Review: A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H.W. Fowler. Globe and Mail, 26 March. See https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-andmedia/review-a-dictionary-of-modern-english-usage-by-hw-fowler/article4312967/ (accessed 6 March 2018). Crystal, D. (2007) The Fight for English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curzan, A. (2014) Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, M. (2008–) Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990–present. See https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (accessed 12 June 2017). Davies, M. (2011–) Google Books Corpus (based on Google Books n-grams). See http:// googlebooks.byu.edu/ (accessed 12 June 2017). Davies, M. (2013a) Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 3+ billion words from 20 countries, updated every day. See https://corpus.byu.edu/now/ (accessed 12 June 2017). Davies, M. (2013b) Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries (GloWbE). See https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/ (accessed 12 June 2017). Davis, L. (2016) 10 grammar mistakes people love to correct (that aren’t actually wrong). Gizmodo, 19 April. See https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/04/10-grammar-mis takes-people-love-to-correct-that-arent-actually-wrong/ (accessed 11 October 2018).

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Elmes, S. (2015) Words, words, words: An insider’s reflections on BBC broadcasting about English. English Today 31, 3–8. Fairman, T. (2002) Mainstream English. English Today 18, 57–62. Finegan, E. (1998) English grammar and usage. In S. Romaine (ed.) Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 4 (pp. 536–588). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzmaurice, S.M. (2016) Sincerity and the moral reanlaysis of politeness in Late Modern English: Semantic change and contingent polysemy. In D. Chapman, C. Moore and M. Wilcox (eds) Generalizing vs. Particularizing Methodologies in Historical Linguistic Analysis (pp. 173–201). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Friedrich, P. and Diniz de Figueiredo, E.H. (2016) The Sociolinguistics of Digital Englishes. New York: Routledge. Fromkin, V., Rodman, R. and Hyams, N. (2017) An Introduction to Language (11th edn). Boston, MA: Cengage. Garner, B.A. (2000) A Texan Fowler. English Today 16, 3–10. Garner, B.A. (2003) Making peace in the language wars. In B.A. Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage (pp. xxxiii–xlvi). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garner, B.A. (2016) Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garner, B.A. and Greene, R.L. (2012) Which language and grammar rules to flout. New York Times, 27 September. See https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/27/ which-language-and-grammar-rules-to-flout (accessed 6 March 2018). Garner, T. and Rubin, D.L. (1986) Middle class Blacks’ perceptions of dialect and style shifting: The case of Southern attorneys. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 5, 33–48. Hitchings, H. (2011) The Language Wars: A History of Proper English. New York: Picador. Hodson, J. (2006) The problem of Joseph Priestley’s (1733–1804) descriptivism. Historiographia Linguistica 33, 57–84. Honey, J. (1997) Language is Power: The Story of Standard English and Its Enemies. London: Faber & Faber. Joseph, J.E. (1987) Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages. New York: Basil Blackwell. kgbgb (2010) Begging the question: How much should we fight for a correct English usage that no one actually seems to use? The Guardian, 24 May. See https://www.theguard ian.com/media/mind-your-language/2010/may/24/begging-the-question-mind-yourlanguage (accessed 11 October 2018). Kuiper, K. and Allan, W.S. (2017) English Language: Word, Sound, and Sentence (4th edn). New York: Palgrave. Liberman, M. (2012) Snacks with few ingredients that you can pronounce. Language Log, Comment by Richard Wein, 7 June. See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4003 (accessed 11 October 2018). Lynch, J. (2007) The English Language: A User’s Guide. Indianapolis, IN: Focus. Marlow, M.L. and Giles, H. (2010) ‘We won’t get ahead speaking like that!’ Expressing and managing language criticism in Hawai’i. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 31, 237–251. Matthews, P.H. (2014) Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (3rd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McArthur, T. (1998) The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntyre, J.E. (2012) Editing and etiquette. The Baltimore Sun, 21 May. See https:// www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/mcintyre/bal-editing-and-etiquette20120521-story.html (accessed 25 May 2020) McPherson, F. (2011) To describe or prescribe, that is the question (with apologies to Shakespeare). Oxford Dictionaries blog post, 22 August. See http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/08/describe-or-prescribe-poll/ (accessed 6 March 2018).

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McWhorter, J. (1998) The Word on the Street: Fact and Fable about American English. Cambridge: Perseus. Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1999) Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English (3rd edn). London: Routledge. Mitchel, D. (2012) A field guide to the wild peevologist. This is So Gay blog post, 14 November. See http://thisislikesogay.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-fi eld-guide-to-wildpeevologist.html (accessed 6 March 2018). Mitchell, L.C. (2001) Grammar Wars: Language as a Cultural Battlefi eld in 17th and 18th Century England. London: Routledge. mr_roboto (2007) Hint: It wasn’t on the screen. MetaFilter blog comment, 14 September. See https://www.metafilter.com/64696/Hint-It-wasnt-what-was-on-the-screen (accessed 11 October 2018). Nunberg, G. (1997) Grammar wars. The Atlantic, July, pp. 6–8. See https://www.the atlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/07/letters/376916/ (accessed 25 May 2020). Nunberg, G. (2012) When words were worth fighting over. NPR Books, 3 October. See https://www.npr.org/2012/10/03/162221715/when-words-were-worth-fighting-over (accessed 6 March 2018). OmieWise (2010) needs replaced v. needs to be replaced. Ask MetaFilter, 15 March. See http://ask.metafi lter.com/148509/needs-replaced-v-needs-to-be-replaced (accessed 6 March 2018). Peters, P. and Young, W. (1997) English grammar and the lexicography of usage. Journal of English Linguistics 25, 315–331. Pinker, S. (2012) False fronts in the language wars. Slate, 31 May. See https://slate.com/ culture/2012/05/steven-pinker-on-the-false-fronts-in-the-language-wars.html (accessed 11 October 2018). Smith, R. (2015) Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji as Word of the Year and yet the sky still hangs above our heads. The Stranger, 22 December. See https://www.thestranger. com/blogs/slog/2015/12/22/23295823/oxford-dictionaries-chose-an-emoji-as-wordof-the-year-and-yet-the-sky-still-hangs-above-our-heads (accessed 6 March 2018). Smitherman, G. (1974–1976) Soul and style. English Journal 63–64. Taylor, T.J. (1990) Which is to be master? The institutionalization of authority in the science of language. In J.E. Joseph and T.J. Tayler (eds) Ideologies of Language (pp. 9–26). London & New York: Routledge. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2020) Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English. London and New York: Routledge. Trask, R.L. (1999) Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge. Williamson, T. (2006) Reference. In D.M. Borchert (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8 (2nd edn) (pp. 288–290). Gale Virtual Reference Library. See http://link.gale group.com/apps/doc/CX3446801715/GVRL?u=byuprovo&sid=GVRL&xid=ca063 fdd (accessed 11 October 2018). Yagoda, B. (2012) Flexiptivists of the World, Unite! The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 November. See https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/11/08/flexip tivists-of-the-world-unite/ (accessed 6 March 2018).

5 The Linguistic Value of Investigating Historical Prescriptivism Lieselotte Anderwald

1 Introduction

For a long time, prescriptivism has mainly served linguists as the ‘other’, a position to distance themselves from and to defi ne themselves against (also cf. Curzan, 2014: 12). Thus, in introductory textbooks the dichotomy descriptivism/prescriptivism is still one of the fi rst topics students of linguistics come across, and one where they are expected to align themselves clearly with the pole of descriptivism. While this is a valid position for defi ning linguistics (after all, we want experts in language to objectively describe how language works, rather than to judge speakers as to what they do wrong), I will argue that investigating (but not promoting) prescriptive attitudes can be beneficial for a descriptive linguist. As I have mostly worked on 19th century prescriptivism, I will concentrate on the values of investigating prescriptivism for the historical linguist, but this does not mean that investigating present-day prescriptivism cannot be of value to synchronic linguists as well (cf. Curzan, 2014). 2 Prescriptivism as a Factor Influencing Language Change 2.1 Previous studies

In this chapter I will be mainly concerned with 19th century grammar books. They fall squarely into the historical period of prescription (Milroy & Milroy, 1999; Nevalainen & Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2006), which for Britain and the USA starts with the 1760s.1 The main topic I have worked on, and one where I see huge benefits for historical linguistics, is the topic of historical prescriptivism as a potential factor influencing language change (Anderwald, 2016a). This factor is surprisingly often appealed to in research dealing with the 19th century, but has so far been substantiated only rarely. 2 While there may be several reasons for this neglect, in my view this has partly been caused by the fact that the 73

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question ‘Did prescriptivism influence language change?’ is surprisingly complex to answer. Prerequisites include a body of ‘actual language’, usually in the form of representative historical corpora, and a representative body of prescriptive sources of the time. Until quite recently, both historical corpora and historical prescriptive sources were not widely available; the fi rst historical corpora (for English) were the Helsinki corpus (cf. Kytö, 1996) and ARCHER (cf. Biber et al., 1994). Both were compiled in the 1990s, but ARCHER did not become publicly available until the 2000s. Both were relatively small and thus could not serve as reliable data sources for mid- to low-frequency phenomena (e.g. changes in individual verb forms, the passival, the incipient stages of language change, the demise of constructions, etc.) or for analyses more fi ne-grained than the maximum 50-year periods envisaged by ARCHER. 3 This situation only changed for American English with the advent of mega-corpora like COHA (Davies 2010–; available since 2010, cf. Davies, 2012, but with its own set of drawbacks), and there is no comparable source for British English (BrE) or for earlier periods yet (i.e. before the 1810s). Prescriptive sources from the 18th and 19th centuries (grammar books, newspaper columns, book reviews, cartoons and possibly others) were available in printed form in various libraries around the world, but never collected systematically or published as collections – with the exception of Alston’s (1974) microfiche collection of grammar books, which stops with the year 1800. At most, we possessed bibliographies of these hidden materials (e.g. Görlach, 1998; also cf. Michael, 1991, 1997), and Görlach, for example, at the end of the millennium still bemoaned the lack of funds, and the impossibility of producing facsimile editions of even the most important 10–15 prescriptive 19th century grammars. This situation only changed in the 21st century with huge digitalization projects like EEBO,4 ECCO, 5 the digitalization of historical newspapers, and the slightly megalomaniac Google Books project, 6 which suddenly made materials available that in and of themselves were not thought worth (re-)publishing before, or where publication was not commercially viable. For this reason, a systematic empirical study of the question ‘Did prescriptivism influence language change in the 19th century?’ has only become possible quite recently. 2.2 The collection of 19th century grammars (CNG)

For my purposes of investigating 19th century prescriptivism – as it is the century that is characterized fi rst and foremost by prescriptivism (Nevalainen & Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2006; Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2009), I collected 258 grammars from Google Books. Most of them were intended for school or self-study, all were published (in their first editions) between 1800 and 1900, and they were from both North America (125) and Britain (133). These were books that were written by native speakers of English for native speakers of English. Over 80% are in the first edition; I

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kept subsequent editions for reference but did not include them in the count. From these books I extracted all material on those linguistic features that were known to be undergoing language change during the 19th century (Anderwald, 2016a) – mostly features of the verb phrase, such as changes in verb paradigms, the progressive, the progressive passive, the get-passive or the be-perfect, for which earlier corpus-linguistic studies (not necessarily by myself) were already available. I then analysed the stances of these grammar books regarding these documented changes. Following Labov’s Principle of Accountability (Labov, 1972a), I also noted which grammars did not comment on a feature.7 In contrast to the comprehensive collection of 18th century normative grammar pronouncements (Sundby et al., 1991), which only includes explicit criticism, I also included neutral (descriptive) positions and positive evaluations, 8 which enabled me to come to new insights on 19th century ‘prescriptive’ grammar writing. For example, the progressive was uniformly praised and even seen as a symbol of national superiority in Britain (Anderwald, 2016b), and the progressive passive in British grammar writing from a certain point in time onwards was simply noted as a normal paradigmatic form (Anderwald, 2014b). Furthermore, the size of my collection enables me to quantify my findings at least tentatively per decade. Thus, I can make substantial claims as to minority vs majority positions through time, and position authors in the context of their time as relatively conservative, innovative or as complete outliers, to study the effects of plagiarism and other similar behaviours. 2.3 Sample study: The rise of the progressive passive

As an example, I would like to present some results from my study of the progressive passive (e.g. the bridge is being built). Although attested sporadically since the 1760s (Bergen, 2013; Denison, 1998; Hundt, 2004), this new construction only started to rise in frequency during the 19th century, as Figure 5.1, based on data from COHA, illustrates. Figure 5.1 also illustrates that the text-type specificity of the progressive passive, well known in present-day studies (e.g. Smith & Rayson, 2007), was already apparent in the second half of the 19th century. Although COHA only contains newspaper data from the 1860s onwards, earlier examples (documented in Bergen, 2013) show that, probably from its inception, the progressive passive was particularly useful in newspaper language (or, perhaps more generally, in expository prose). The rise of the progressive passive clearly continues into the 20th century – at least until the 1940s for American English (cf. Hundt, 2004, for the parallel development in BrE). The striking decline of the progressive passive in newspapers since then is specific to American English and is probably due to the more general stricture against the passive (Anderwald, 2014a) – a rare example of successful prescriptivism in the 20th century, if only in one specific text type (but cf. Hinrichs et al., 2015).

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The text frequency of the progressive passive in COHA

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Figure 5.1 The text-type specific rise of the progressive passive in American English (based on COHA, normalized text frequency per 100,000 words)

Following Labov’s observation that ‘people will reject changes in the structure of language when they become aware of them’ (Labov, 2001: 514), it is perhaps to be expected that grammar writers (surely a subclass of people) were not overjoyed with this new construction. However, even given the different rhetorical conventions in the 19th century, the force of criticism that the progressive passive met with is astounding. Measured against other, equally new constructions, the progressive passive clearly stands out. The violence with which it was opposed becomes clear in the epithets employed both in Britain and in the USA (for a full analysis, cf. Anderwald, 2014b). It was called a tautology, a contradiction, unnecessary or ambiguous. It was classified as a solecism or an absurdity; it was called ungrammatical, and criticized for using incompatible terms. It was also called cumbersome, awkward, ugly, deformed, uncouth, inelegant, objectionable and disagreeable. It was compared to an upstart that was not sanctioned by authority, introduced by the lowest class of writers, an affected form that was inappropriate, in bad taste or barbarous. Grammar writers said it was shamefully bad or despicable, and it (or presumably its users) were careless, loose, shameful, of doubtful propriety, not respectable; also, it was called an illegitimate form and not pure. In these epithets, grammar writers clearly related to discourses familiar from logic and grammar analysis (e.g. solecism as a technical term indicating a specific grammatical mistake), but also conveyed aesthetic connotations (ugly, deformed), social criticism (upstart, low class, affected, inelegant) and even moral condemnation (relating to propriety, respectability,

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legitimacy, impurity or shame). Quantifying the comments, it is striking that even though the progressive passive was objectively quite rare (as Figure 5.1 details, it occurred over much of the 19th century less than five times per 100,000 words – 100,000 words being quite a lengthy book), it is mentioned by over 50% of all grammar writers from the 1810s and 1820s onwards, that is, quite early. Even more strikingly, two-thirds of the 73 American grammars that mention the progressive passive criticize it, but only one-third of the 74 British grammars do. Given that this criticism was more widespread in America, it is not surprising that it also persisted longer in America (until the 1870s) than in Britain, where the majority note this construction more or less descriptively from the 1840s onwards. Overall, American grammars were thus more prescriptive, used much stronger terms and were prescriptive for longer than in Britain – a pattern that is repeated for many other phenomena as well (Anderwald, 2016a: Chapter 9) and seems to persist until today. We are now in a position to temporally correlate the detailed corpuslinguistic data on the (text-type specific) rise of the progressive passive with the data on prescriptive stances on this construction in American grammar books of the time. Surely a temporal correlation is an essential prerequisite for positing, or at least considering, potential causal links. Specifically, any empirical claim as to the ‘success’ of a prescriptive dictum would have to be able to show that the prescription was there fi rst, and that language changed after (and then because of) it.9 While it may be difficult, in the absence of parallel universes, to say with certainty what would have happened if x had not been there, we are in the fortunate position of having detailed knowledge on what unimpeded language change looks like (for just one collection of examples, cf. Nevalainen & RaumolinBrunberg, 1996). Striking deviations from the usual S-curve patterns could thus be the fi rst indication of a potential prescriptive influence. For the sake of better comparison, Figure 5.2 repeats the corpus data of Figure 5.1, but only for the 19th century, and adds the percentages of American grammar writers (per decade) that are explicitly critical of the progressive passive on a second scale (indicated by the dotted line). Figure 5.2 shows that criticism of the progressive passive in American grammars was strongest between the 1840s and the 1860s, where up to 80% of grammars mention this construction with the highly negative terms encountered above. While the overall rise of the progressive passive seems only little affected, the massive dip in newspaper usage (where the progressive passive loses over 40% between the 1860s and the 1870s) may very well be due to deliberate editing, and thus a deliberate avoidance of this criticized construction. Of course, heavily policed text types like newspapers (where, after all, editors and copy editors take an active part in the writing and publishing process) lend themselves quite easily to institutional changes from above (cf. again Hinrichs et al., 2015, for a similar

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Figure 5.2 The rise of the progressive passive (19th century only) and its explicit criticism in American grammars

case in the 20th century). There is, thus, at least potentially an influence of the strong prescriptivist stance (proscription of the progressive passive) from the 1840s to the 1860s on the genre of newspapers during the 1870s and 1880s, but this translates only to a slight slowing down of the rise of the progressive passive overall – an effect that is, moreover, quickly compensated for afterwards. The rise in the progressive passive more than makes up for the slight delay. Combining corpus-linguistic and grammaticographic insights and correlating them temporally thus allows us to come to an empirical assessment of the impact of prescriptivism, or the lack of it, on language change. We can now compare prescriptive judgements on different linguistic phenomena, observe the emergence of different prescriptive traditions (e.g. in Britain and the USA), and compare majority and minority positions within the field of prescriptivism across the decades. Thus, we can come to an empirically founded, rather than impressionistic or anecdotal, assessment of historical prescriptivism as a factor influencing language change. At the very least, these kinds of individual studies should make us very wary whenever prescriptivism is invoked as a general, all-purpose explanation for unexpected developments in language change. From my studies of features of the verb phrase in the 19th century at least, it looks like prescriptivism had at most a small, temporary and delaying influence on just a few phenomena – an influence that was then quickly reversed as soon as prescriptive pressure lessened.10 Although this may look like a rather meagre result for time-consuming and labour-intensive studies, debunking the myth of the presumed efficacy of prescriptivism is already an interesting result.

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2.4 Prescriptivism and other aspects of historical linguistics

In addition, investigating prescriptive literature may well have a wider appeal for the historical linguist. In my experience, much prescriptive writing typically includes a grain of descriptive ‘truth’ (Anderwald, 2014b). Staying with the example of the progressive passive, there are early indications in the prescriptive literature that the progressive passive was found in specific registers, corroborating the fi ndings in Bergen (2013). Thus, Peter Bullions (1845: 213) calls the progressive passive ‘a clumsy solecism, which has been introduced within the last forty years, chiefly through the newspaper press’ (emphasis added). If we abstract away from the denigrating epithets here, we are left with a remarkably accurate dating of the introduction and the first rise of this construction to prominence; in addition, Bullions specifically refers to newspapers. Writing at the same time, Richard Parker and Charles Fox similarly say ‘such expressions … have recently become quite common, not only in the periodical publications of the day, but are likewise fi nding favour with popular writers’ (Parker & Fox, 1835: 20, my emphasis). Therefore, the progressive passive must have early on become a salient feature of newspaper and periodical publications, matching very well the text-type specificity documented for only much later periods (Smith & Rayson, 2007). These early prescriptive comments can thus provide tentative evidence for periods where we possess little corpus evidence for a feature, a register or its users. In addition, we can gain an insight into culture- and time-specific salience. Thus, the fiercest criticism of the progressive relates to its perceived complexity (indicated above by Bullions’ use of clumsy), and much ridicule was spent on its sequence of auxiliary verbs – surely some evidence that constructions with be/being were still felt to be unusual and noteworthy (cf. Denison, 1998, for speculation on the status of be at the time; cf. Anderwald, 2014b, for a much more detailed analysis). Furthermore, some information may also be gleaned from prescriptive sources on (the perception of) frequency data – thus, occasionally authors explicitly call certain forms rare, archaic or obsolete, or, as in the quotation by Parker and Fox above, they notice change explicitly (‘have recently become quite common’). While it is certainly not recommended to take every claim in grammar books at face value, a careful comparison of grammars of the same time with evidence from other sources can at least hint at how to close some of the gaps that quantitative historical corpuslinguistics still has. In addition, some sociolinguistically relevant information is forthcoming, if not on the actual users of a certain construction, then on their perceived attributes and status. Thus, the denigration of early users of the progressive passive as ‘uncouth’, ‘ignorant’, ‘upstarts’ or ‘insolent’, or their use of language as an ‘effrontery’ (as in some of the epithets quoted above) hints at the fact that these speakers are perceived as not being members of

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an educated elite; some attributes even recall discourses of social change and upheaval. Presumably not that much has changed until today, in that a criticism of quite innocent linguistic features or constructions can serve as a means to indirectly criticize their speakers. Investigations of prescriptive discourses are thus intimately tied up with a discussion of the evolution of prestige, stigma and more general functions of gatekeeping, such as social elites and their mechanisms, and so open up an important sociological dimension as well. Apart from these detailed micro-studies of attitudes towards specific features, prescriptivism can of course also be investigated as an interesting social fact in itself. Once we have more detailed studies of the discourses involved, their temporal evolution, their main proponents and perhaps national or regional similarities and differences, we can then also sociologically investigate in more detail the cultural climate of the time, link prescriptivist discourses with wider societal discourses and investigate how discrimination against speakers was and is framed. Then we can analyse whether this kind of linguistic prescriptivism is an anthropological constant, a sign of the times, an epiphenomenon of other developments or perhaps something else altogether. 3 The Value of Investigating Prescriptivism for Historical Enregisterment

In some prescriptive sources, we may also come across indications of the historical enregisterment of varieties. Since enregisterment (in the sense of Agha, 2003, 2005, 2007) is always concerned with meta-discourses, grammar writing and other prescriptivist sources should be particularly rich materials: they are by their very nature ‘talk about talk’ (in the sense of Johnstone et al., 2006). Relevant questions for investigators are: Which linguistic features can be found in this discourse, and when? Which dialects are mentioned, and which linguistic features evolve as consistently linked to a variety? Which social meaning was linked to which feature? A detailed study should of course also be based on a number of other sources, not least literary and other stylized sources (as used in Beal & Cooper, 2015; Cooper, 2011; Hodson, 2014; and especially contributions in Hodson, 2017; on historical enregisterment, cf. in particular Beal, 2009, 2012, 2017), but taking prescriptive writing as an additional data source may further generate important input to this emerging field of historical enregisterment. As just one example, I would like to cite my case study on the 19th century American English construction (have) gotten. As part of present (or, more rarely, the past) perfect forms, this past participle has become a ‘hallmark of American speech’ today (e.g. Mencken, 1948: 363). Because it is historically attested, it is today usually cited as an example of a historical retention. In turn, the use of (have) gotten makes American English a conservative variety (thus, Marckwardt, 1958: 59–80 cites it as his prime

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The text frequency of (have) gotten in COHA 50 Occurrences per 1 million words

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Figure 5.3 The decline, and rise, of (HAVE) gotten in COHA (normalized text frequency per 1 million words, all forms of HAVE included)

example of ‘colonial lag’), and at the same time legitimizes American English as a more conservative, even ‘archaic’ variety, in contrast to the earlier (or maybe parallel) discourse of American English as a ‘degenerate’ or ‘corrupt’ version of BrE (e.g. Curme, 1927). However, as Figure 5.3 illustrates, historical corpus data clearly show that the perfect form (have) gotten is a more modern development (Anderwald, forthcoming; Hundt, 2009). The perfect forms with the older participle gotten (almost) died out in North America, as they did in Britain, but they were then revived in American English after the 1850s (for this reason, Hundt, 2009, calls gotten a ‘post-colonial revival’), possibly under the influence of strong Scotch-Irish immigration in America (e.g. Jespersen, 1931: 54). Gotten then continues to increase massively into the 20th century, as Figure 5.3 clearly shows. The original decline and subsequent rise can be shown better by zooming in on the 19th century, as in Figure 5.4. To be fair, this decline and revival of perfect gotten must have been difficult for contemporaneous observers to identify correctly; as the difference in scale also indicates, (have) gotten was 10 times rarer (in writing) than the already rare progressive passive above. The piecemeal information that was available (the historical provenance of gotten in written records, contemporaneous instances in American English, but not in British English) must have led observers to jump to the (premature) conclusion that, indeed, gotten was a simple case of a lexical retention. Nevertheless, this interpretation (contradicting the actual process of a decline and revival) has clearly served ideological purposes. As mentioned above, gotten was (and still is) indexically linked to a (purported) linguistic conservativism of American English, i.e. to its ‘archaic’ character, and this in turn serves popular

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American grammars mentioning participle gotten (19th century) 80 70

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Figure 5.4 The decline, and rise, of (have) gotten and its mention in American grammars of the time

writers on language to valorize American English in the 20th century. It is perhaps interesting to note that this legitimizing discourse sits strangely at odds with the simultaneous perception of American English as simplifying, innovating, promoting and leading changes worldwide (most blatantly, for example, in Kövecses, 2000). In the 20th century this archaizing interpretation of American English was also projected back onto the early 19th century, especially to the (aftermath of) political, cultural and linguistic independence of the newly emerging nation and the purported rise in national consciousness and self-confidence, etc. However, the available evidence from prescriptive sources again paints a different picture. Grammar writers at the time were quite conservative, and thus do note many obsolete and nearly obsolete grammatical forms,11 among others the participle gotten. However, gotten actually only appears in at most 30% of all tables of irregular verbs in American grammars of the time – much more rarely than other forms. The trend to mention gotten is strongest in the 1840s and 1850s, and then declines, as Figure 5.4 shows. However, not a single grammar notes gotten as a specifically American form; it is recommended, then – presumably – because of its historical provenance.12 Besides, designating something as an Americanism would probably have been equivalent to a recommendation not to use it over much of the 19th century (Finegan, 1980: 69; also cf. Görlach, 1987). It is thus highly unlikely that the documented revival of gotten in the second half of the 19th century was actually caused by a favourable treatment of the form in grammar books of the time. Instead, gotten rose presumably for other reasons (plausibly through the unnoticed influence of

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Scotch-Irish immigrants), and was then – post factum, once its frequency had become perceptually salient – interpreted as a legitimate American form (because it was a conservative form). This argument fi rst entered popular discourse in the 1870s, when popular (but not necessarily linguistically sophisticated) writers on language such as Richard Grant White defended gotten as a historically legitimate form (White, 1870). White himself was actually arguing fiercely against the concept of Americanisms, and against the idea of American English as a distinct variety (White, 1877a, 1877b, 1878a, 1878b, 1878c, 1878d, 1878e, 1878f, 1879a, 1879b, 1879c). However, the interpretation of gotten as a historical form was then taken up, ideologized as a defence of American English as a legitimate variety (most notably in Curme, 1927), and popularized by early 20th century authors such as H.L. Mencken, Albert H. Marckwardt and others. Gotten as a ‘historical retention’ can thus be shown to be a mainly 20th century myth, but surely one that has important repercussions on the stereotypes society has of the American variety, of American society, its cultural values, its relation to Britain and other similar ideas. A careful analysis of historical prescriptive and other sources can help us as linguists to set the historical record straight, debunk powerful myths that have become part of common ‘knowledge’, and investigate the complex interplay of actual language use and indexically linked ideologies that shape the way laypeople and language experts alike think about varieties today.

4 The Value of Investigating Prescriptivism for the Historical Process of Non-standardization 4.1 The emergence of stigmatization

Finally, and perhaps most seriously, I think that linguists should study, and engage with, historical prescriptivism in order to better understand where phenomena like present-day linguistic discrimination, linguistic profi ling, stereotyping and the stigmatization of speakers come from. If I have shown in my work so far that 19th century prescriptivism had little ‘influence’ or ‘impact’ on the English language, this only applies to actual language change. However, language is not just a collection of abstract linguistic facts. First and foremost, language is a social institution, and perhaps its social function is even more important than its value as an information carrier. In fact, the identity function of the English language seems to be particularly strongly indexed, such that in Britain and North America social identities are extremely quickly assigned to speakers on the basis of very few linguistic items. Pronunciation, intonation, single lexemes or a single construction can cause massive discrimination of speakers as to their presumed intelligence, job suitability, moral values, education, credibility in court and possibly worse judgements (cf. only most recently Rickford & King, 2016; and perhaps even more shockingly

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the details in Labov, 1982). While much work, especially by sociolinguists, has concentrated on debunking some of these stereotypes (for a critical approach, cf. the recent discussion in Language in Society, starting with Lewis, 2018), the historical evolution of specific indexical links has so far not been investigated in detail. In order to study the development of what I am going to call the ‘nonstandardization’ of widespread features of spoken (but not written) English, I have set up a research programme into what Chambers has called ‘vernacular universals’ (Chambers, 1995, 2000, 2004, 2009a, 2009b): recurring linguistic features that all (or many) varieties of English share, but that disappeared from the normative standard during the process of standardization. As historical sociolinguistic studies have shown, features such as multiple negation, adverbs without -ly or plural was became very rare in written materials long before the advent of prescriptivism as such (Nevalainen, 2006a, 2006b, 2008, 2009). Prescriptive grammar writing thus cannot have been instrumental in influencing these changes, and probably played a smaller role in the process of standardization than previously assumed (cf. for example, Milroy & Milroy, 1999). As I will argue, however, prescriptivism (from various sources, not just through prescriptive grammar books) was instrumental in actively constructing a new register of nonstandard, ‘vulgar’ and ‘uneducated’ speech to which these features were relegated. Thus, prescriptivism conferred on these salient features the social evaluation that we now almost immediately associate with them once they appear in people’s speech, in their writing or when they are instrumentalized, namely for purposes of characterization in fictional speech (e.g. Lippi-Green, 2012). Today, many nonstandard features have become shibboleths of lack of education, of ‘bad’ English, of not being ‘well-spoken’, of ‘improper’ behaviour or worse. Even so, I want to show that these close links with moral judgements are very much a legacy of the 19th century, from which we have inherited concepts such as ‘slovenly’ grammar and the ‘decline’ of standards, or developed new slogans such as ‘stop sounding stupid’.13 However, this historical process itself has never been empirically investigated for features of nonstandard grammar, only postulated (e.g. by Stein, 1993). As a pilot study, I have investigated four widespread grammatical features in about half of my grammars (Anderwald, 2017), the gist of which I will briefly recapture. 4.2 Vernacular universals

Multiple negation, adverbs without -ly or plural was are features that almost all varieties of English share (cf. as a first approximation Kortmann, 2012; Schneider, 2012, for British and American varieties). However, rather than postulate that they therefore must be ‘natural outgrowths of the language faculty’, as Chambers (e.g. 2004: 128) does, it probably

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makes more sense to investigate them under the heading of historical contingencies and sociocultural circumstances that led to their non-standardization. As mentioned above, in the (mostly Early Modern) processes of supralocalization – in written registers – multiple negation, unmarked adverbs and was with plural subjects had already become quite rare (Laitinen, 2009; Nevalainen, 2006a, 2008, 2009; you was may well be a special development, cf. Nevalainen, 2006b), and therefore presumably became indexically linked with spoken (or simply more informal) registers. As my sample analysis of just the prescriptive register of grammar writing shows, writers in the 19th century were instrumental in then subsequently negatively evaluating and stigmatizing some of these widespread spoken features. Interestingly, however, not all nonstandard features were being stigmatized to the same degree. Instead, individual features show quite different profi les, matching quite well the different treatments we still observe today. In addition, interesting temporal developments led to significant differences between American and British sources, and this may well have paved the way towards the different degrees of stigmatization we still observe today. 4.3 The salience of vernacular universals

An overview of how many grammars actually mentioned one of the four features under investigation already gives us an interesting insight into their social salience. As Figure 5.5 illustrates, the all-time favourite is multiple negation, which was and is one of the most stigmatized features of spoken language, explicitly mentioned by almost 80% of all American grammar writers (and still some two-thirds of British ones). Adverbs without -ly (e.g. go slow) and the ‘lack of concord’ in you was are still very frequently encountered in ‘cautions’, exercises of ‘false syntax’ or in the

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Figure 5.5 The number of grammars mentioning four vernacular universals (CNG sample, both British and American grammars)

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Figure 5.6 British–American diff erences in mentioning multiple negation (CNG sample, all mentions)

running text guarding speakers against ‘misuses’, but they show a striking regional differentiation. Although in all cases American grammars mention these features much more often than British grammars do, the difference between American and British grammars is starkest for the two concord phenomena, you was and plural there is/there was (e.g. there is five people in the room). American grammars note these features roughly twice as frequently as British ones do. In addition, the temporal trajectories of the evaluative comments also differ significantly, as Figures 5.6 and 5.7 illustrate. At one end of the Grammars mentioning plural there is/there was 100

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Figure 5.7 British–American diff erences in mentioning plural there is/there was (CNG sample, all mentions)

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scale, multiple negation (and also adverbs without -ly, where comments pattern very similarly) continues to be a topic of American grammar writing; in addition (not visible from this overview diagram), comments continue to be very negative (cf. Section 4.4. below), whereas in British grammars, mentioning (and criticizing) multiple negation becomes a minority stance and disappears towards the end of the century. (A similar trend occurs with you was, although the preliminary figures are more divergent here.) On the other hand, plural there is/there was seems to fade from grammar writers’ consciousness towards the end of the 19th century both in Britain and the USA, and is only very rarely mentioned after the 1830s. As the next section shows, comments on plural there is/there was also never reach the same kind of vitriolic intensity that multiple negation elicits. 4.4 The stigmatization of vernacular universals

As already mentioned above, what also differs strikingly between features is the evaluative language used. At one end of the scale, multiple negation is denigrated in the harshest terms; at the other end, plural there is/there was is only occasionally found among many other examples in long pages of ‘false syntax’, if it is mentioned at all, often without explicit instructions on what pupils were supposed to change or much more evaluation than the heading of ‘exercises in false syntax’. Of course, more frequent mentions of multiple negation mean that overall more comments can be found. The treatment is strikingly different, nonetheless. Multiple negation is called ignorant, uneducated, illogical, a solecism, an error, false, incorrect, a blunder, careless, gross, improper, objectionable, unidiomatic, an offence, thoughtless and unthinking. Adverbs without -ly are called not good usage, enallage, an error, false, a fault, incorrect, not allowed, wrong, abnormal, careless, a corruption, a deviation, gross, improper and negligent. You was is similarly called ignorant, not good English, a solecism, an error, false, incorrect, a blunder, improper or an offence, linking the (obvious) discourse of ‘mistake’ with negative social evaluation. By contrast, there is/there was is at most linked to evaluations as a fault, an error to be avoided, an impropriety and incorrect. As mentioned above, the indexical field of ‘mistakes’ is expected, given that in many cases these nonstandard forms only appear in exercises of errors to be corrected. In a sense, one could say that this constitutes the essence of normative grammar writing: dictating what is right, and what is wrong. In addition, however, especially in longer passages, multiple negation is linked to discourses of morality (careless, improper, offence, thoughtless), education (uneducated, ignorant, illogical) and social evaluation (improper). Adverbs without -ly are, in addition, linked to a discourse of ‘unacceptability’ (abnormal, corruption, deviation, gross), whereas the link to ‘error’ is not as strong – calling adverbs without -ly ‘enallage’

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(a  figure from rhetoric where one grammatical form is exchanged for another) almost gives it some legitimacy, and the advice is frequently to use it in moderation only. Adverbs without -ly are also allowed in historical examples, especially in poetry, but authors may advise their readers that ‘this usage should be avoided in prose’ (e.g. Davidson & Alcock, 1876: 167). By contrast, the indexical link to (lack of) knowledge is particularly striking for you was (ignorant, blunder), and the criticism of you was again carries social and moral overtones (improper, offence, blunder). Presumably more indexical fields will become apparent as my investigation widens to more phenomena and to an inclusion of all 258 grammar books. In the differential treatment of individual phenomena, their temporal evolution and the striking national differences between the USA and Britain, however, we can already see from my sample studies that much of what is a staple of present-day sociolinguistics is already prefigured in the 19th century. Multiple negation becomes linked to much stronger evaluative terms than plural there is/there was, where even just mentioning them as ‘mistakes’ becomes a rarity after the 1830s both in Britain and in the USA. By contrast, the evaluation of multiple negation persists throughout the century, especially in the USA. It is thus perhaps not surprising that multiple negation has remained probably the most stigmatized feature of nonstandard English(es) (Labov, 1972b), whereas plural there is/there was goes virtually unnoticed today (cf. Hilton, 2016). In other words, what is mentioned less in the 19th century, and what is criticized less in the 19th century, also turns out to be less stigmatized today. In reverse, we could probably say that one of the legacies of 19th century prescriptivism is present-day linguistic discrimination, and the widespread feeling that this is just ‘common sense’. Clearly as linguists, perhaps also as a discipline, we need this historical knowledge in order to be able to counteract its effects on everyday speakers, and on present-day society. 5 Conclusion

I hope to have shown in this programmatic contribution that studying 19th century prescriptivism may open up valuable fields, or constitute valuable additions to existing fields, that justify our academic interest. Thus, prescriptivism may have contributed to actual language change, and even fi nding out that it didn’t constitutes an interesting academic fact, given the widespread belief in prescriptive efficacy among linguists. Contextualizing prescriptivism in the discourses of its times may, in addition, add to our understanding of the (contemporaneous) conceptualization of processes of language change. It can give us an insight into widespread (or unusual) arguments for or against language change, assess their effectiveness, and overall provide us with another lens through which to view a historical era. A careful analysis of prescriptive claims may also

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provide us with some descriptively adequate kernels which, if we are lucky, may even fill some gaps in the documented language history. Besides these (potentially valuable) insights into historical linguistic processes, linguistic prescriptivism clearly holds much social and societal importance historically, but presumably also synchronically, and thus should be worth our scholarly attention for this reason alone. Finally, I have tried to make the point that English and American prescriptivism in the 19th century was instrumental in shaping our present-day views (as a society) of how language usage indexes speakers socially, and that it shows how the educated elite act as gatekeepers of social and moral values. If we take the sociolinguistic appeal to the social responsibility of linguists seriously (in the sense of Labov’s Principle of Error Correction, cf. Labov, 1982), then as historical linguists surely we also have a responsibility to counteract widespread errors or injustices when we see them. We should perhaps feel obligated ‘to bring this error to the attention of the widest possible audience’ (Labov, 1982: 172).14 Fortunately we now possess the means to conduct analyses to this end. Notes (1) I will not diff erentiate between codifi cation and prescription here, since all laying down of rules (codifi cation) involved (explicit or implicit) criticism of variation (prescription) at the time, and correction of ‘errors’ as well as denigration of linguistic variants (and their speakers) was widespread from the 1760s onwards. In fact, even a text-type distinction between the grammar and the usage guide cannot be drawn for the 19th century yet, since practically all grammars also contained usage advice. Instead, I follow the well-known opposition of descriptivism and prescriptivism as set out in the introduction and take 19th century normative grammars as (proto)typical instances of prescriptivism. The point that many prescriptive dicta may contain descriptively interesting details is made later. The question of how far descriptive linguistic work is also prescriptive is raised by Marla Perkins (this volume). (2) Some studies that mainly focus on the 18th century include material for the 19th century as well (Auer, 2006, 2009; Yáñez-Bouza, 2015); however, they use rather large temporal sections in their corpus studies (up to half a century, see below), and rather few prescriptivist sources from the 19th century. (3) Thus, in 2009 Auer, for example, could still claim that macro-level studies had started ‘only recently’ (Auer, 2009: 5). (4) See https://eebo.chadwyck.com/marketing/about.htm. (5) See https://www.gale.com/c/eighteenth-century-collections-online-part-i. (6) See https://books.google.com/. (7) Similarly, Poplack et  al. (2015) for French, Yáñez-Bouza (2015) for 18th century English. Other studies have differentiated comments according to their acceptability, but have not looked at the absence of comments. (8) Similarly Auer (2006, 2009) for the 18th century. (9) On the gap between a change in what she calls precept (normative grammars) and usage (cf. again Auer, 2009: 68–71). However, since her corpus study is based on ARCHER, the periods can at most be broken down into half-centuries, and her temporal correlation thus necessarily must be rather vague (for the subjunctive, she fi nds a small prescriptive effect ‘which lasted for approximately 100 years’, Auer, 2009: 71).

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(10) Again, for similar results from the 18th century, see Auer (2006, 2009) and Auer and González-Díaz (2005). For the 20th century, see also Peters (2006). For other languages, namely French, see Poplack et al. (2015). (11) Some examples taken from American grammars are past tenses – clave (for clove/ cleaved), strid (for strode), betid (for betided), girt (for girded) or het (for heated) – all in the very influential grammar by Brown (1851), but also in many others. (12) Incidentally, this is also true for the British grammars (not depicted here). In 19th century grammar writing, also from the outside the use of gotten was not noted (yet) as an Americanism. (13) As just one example, cf. the well-known poster campaign referred to here at http:// www.squarefree.com/2005/06/03/dont-sound-stupid-stop-saying-like/. (14) But cf. again Lewis (2018).

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6 Examining the Split Infinitive: Prescriptivism as a Constraint in Language Variation and Change Viktorija Kostadinova

1 Introduction

Although linguistics is a descriptive science and linguists have, consequently, displayed little interest in studying prescriptivism (cf. Tottie, 1997: 84), the last few decades have seen important work done on the influence of prescriptive ideology on both language use and language users (e.g. Cameron, 1995; Curzan, 2014; Milroy & Milroy, 1985). One of the important questions at the center of prescriptivism research relates to the influence of prescriptive ideology on language variation and change, and previous research has identified three areas of such influence. First, when exploring prescriptive influence, it is important to make a distinction between influence on language variation and influence on language change (cf. Anderwald, 2014; Auer & González-Díaz, 2005; Chafe, 1984; Dekeyser, 1975). Secondly, prescriptivism itself is a variable phenomenon, and different types of prescriptivism need to be approached differently; a useful approach here is Curzan’s (2014: 12–40) distinction between standardizing prescriptivism, stylistic prescriptivism, restorative prescriptivism and politically responsive prescriptivism. Finally, research in this field has shown that prescriptive ideology changes over time, so attempting to ascertain prescriptive influence should include a careful analysis of the prescriptive precept itself (cf. Anderwald, 2012, 2014; Auer & GonzálezDíaz, 2005; Yáñez-Bouza, 2015). Despite these observations, many gaps and contradictions remain in our understanding of the relationship between prescriptivism and language variation and change, especially with respect to specific linguistic features. In this chapter, I explore the complex nature of prescriptive influence on the use of split infi nitives in English and discuss this case as 95

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evidence that prescriptive influence, more often than not, cannot be seen simply as a case of a neat binary opposition between presence and absence. Rather, prescriptive influence depends on multiple factors. The split infi nitive is chosen as a case study because, as will be shown below, it is unclear whether the use of the split infi nitive is influenced by prescriptivism or not. 2 The Influence of Prescriptivism on Language

The question of how much influence prescriptivism has on language variation and change has been investigated in studies dealing with the nature and effects of language prescriptions found in normative grammars (e.g. Anderwald, 2012, 2014; Auer, 2009; Auer & González-Díaz, 2005; Dekeyser, 1975; Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1982; Yáñez-Bouza, 2015) and in usage guides (e.g. Albakry, 2007; Ebner, 2017; Kostadinova, 2018a; Peters, 2014). All of these studies use various methods to compare prescriptions found in metalinguistic works (i.e. precept), such as normative grammars and usage guides, with patterns of language use (i.e. practice), to shed light on the relationship between prescriptions and language variation and change. In other words, these studies all analyze linguistic precept (cf. for example, Auer, 2009: 4–11) to evaluate the potential influence of prescriptivism. In addition, certain analyses on the influence of prescriptivism have focused on investigating different constraints on the use of proscribed variants. For instance, an early multifactorial quantitative study is reported by Kroch and Small (1978), who looked at the effects of ‘grammatical ideology’ on speech. By analyzing the standard and nonstandard variants of two forms (particle movement and deletion of complementizer that) used by radio hosts and call-in listeners, Kroch and Small found that radio hosts used a greater number of the standard variants than their listeners. They concluded that grammatical ideology had a measurable effect on speech. Tottie (1997) examined the influence of literacy and prescriptivism on the variation between that and which and the variation between that and who in both British and American English. With respect specifically to American English, she found that the patterns of use of that as opposed to wh-forms seem to be affected by the opposing influences of literacy and prescriptivism. According to Tottie, spoken and general written data from American English show that as the more frequent choice, and she associates this with the influence of prescriptivism. On the other hand, among highly educated American speakers, wh-forms were found to be more frequent compared to general or spoken usage, which Tottie explains is the result of literacy. She concludes that literacy and prescriptivism have opposite effects: the former affects the linguistic behavior of speakers, especially in formal contexts, while the latter affects editorial practice, and consequently written usage. Hinrichs et al. (2015) more recently did an empirical investigation on the

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eff ects of prescriptivism on 20th century American English, which showed that prescriptivism may have had an influence on language change. However, this influence is mediated by other social processes. Specifically, Hinrichs et al. (2015) show that certain language features are more sensitive to prescriptive influence than others, and that additional processes, such as colloquialization or strong language authority, might play a crucial role in determining which language features will eventually be influenced by prescriptivism. This research is methodologically groundbreaking, in that Hinrichs et  al. (2015) applied a novel approach to empirically testing and measuring prescriptive influence; their research has influenced the approach taken here. While this overview of previous studies of prescriptivism does not purport to be exhaustive, it serves to illustrate two important considerations in approaching an analysis of the influence of prescriptivism; the fi rst is related to the nature of this influence and the second is methodological. First, with respect to the nature of prescriptive influence, it has been shown that we need to distinguish between the effects of prescriptivism on language variation and the effects of prescriptivism on language change. This is because, in most cases, prescriptivism has little influence on language change; any eff ects of prescriptivism that were postulated in previous studies were temporary (e.g. Auer & GonzálezDíaz, 2005; Chafe, 1984; Dekeyser, 1975; but see Molencki, 2003). However, the effects of prescriptivism on language variation, and specifi cally register variation, have been found to be more robust. For instance, Dekeyser (1975), Chafe (1984), Auer and González-Díaz (2005) and Anderwald (2014) all fi nd that although proscribed variants do not seem to be affected by prescriptivism in the long term, at specific points in time proscribed variants were less frequent in edited or formal registers and more frequent in spoken data or in fiction. These studies also show the limitations of comparing precept and practice, because similarities in precept and practice trends do not automatically mean that they are causally related (cf. Curzan, 2014: 84; Hinrichs et  al., 2015: 806). Using the main fi ndings of the studies mentioned above as points of departure, I approach the case of the split infi nitive in order to explore the influence of prescriptivism on its use. The approach I take may be considered an extended version of the precept vs practice approach. Specifically, I extend the analysis of language practice: in addition to studying practice by focusing on the linguistic feature in question, I supplement this analysis with an additional multifactorial study of the potential influence of prescriptivism on the use of split infi nitives. In other words, in addition to accounting for the frequency distributions of split infi nitives across time periods and corpus genres, I also look at whether the use of split infi nitives in specific corpus texts is more common in the presence of other prescriptively targeted features in those texts.

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3 The Split Infinitive

Split infi nitives are constructions in which an element is positioned between the infi nitival to and the verb (see, for example, Huddleston & Pullum, 2002: 581–582; Quirk et al., 1985: 496–498).1 This feature has long been considered incorrect from the viewpoint of prescriptive ideology and can be seen as an ‘old chestnut’ among usage problems (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2015: 57). Evidence suggests that the proscription on split infi nitives originated in the 19th century, and it appears to have been motivated by the ideal of Teutonic purity based on the relationship between English and German (Perales-Escudero, 2011). In this section, I outline what I consider to be the main points in the literature related to the use of the split infi nitive and its status as a usage problem. Crucially for my concern here, these points contradict each other concerning the potential prescriptive influence on the use of split infi nitives. The main points I discuss below are the following: (a) the split infi nitive has a long history in the English language; (b) it has been increasing in frequency, especially over the last century or so; (c) the use of the split infi nitive is evidence that the feature has not been affected by prescriptivism; (d) the strong proscription against the split infi nitive has aff ected its use; and (e) the proscription on the split infi nitive is weakening. The use of the split infi nitive can be traced back to the appearance of the to-infi nitive in Anglo-Saxon English (Bryant, 1946). This meant that the particle to was not connected to the verb and, as a result of the tendency for adverbial modifiers to immediately precede the word they modify, it became possible to separate the to from the verb with a modifier (Bryant, 1946). Fischer (2000) provides important insights into the historical development of the split infi nitive in the context of the reversal of the grammaticalization process of the infi nitival to. Fischer notes that the increased number of split infi nitives, fi rst attested in the 14th century, was indicative of a ‘disturbed’ process of grammaticalization. Calle-Martín and Miranda-García (2009: 347) observe that the construction became more frequent after the 14th century, and it became characteristic of the personal style of certain authors. They further note that the use of the split infi nitive decreased during the 16th and 17th centuries, only to pick up again during the 18th century. Calle-Martín and Miranda-García (2009: 347) consider this to be a significant case showing a variant resisting prescriptive pressure against its use, a point I discuss in more detail below. They also found overwhelming evidence of non-split infi nitives, but they still fi nd ‘a significant decrease of non-splitting constructions’ in the 19th and 20th centuries, ‘thus coinciding with the actual spread of the construction’ (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García, 2009: 351). These observations are also reflected in the work on negative split infi nitives – infi nitives split by the negative operator not – carried out by Fitzmaurice (2000a,

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2000b) and Perales-Escudero (2011), who both show that negative split infi nitives are increasing in frequency in present-day English, although they are still not the preferred option. Fitzmaurice (2000b) argues that the use of the negative split infi nitive is a case of stylistic levelling, whereby, due to the mixing of different varieties in spoken media registers, certain features change their status from colloquial to conventional and become unmarked (Fitzmaurice, 2000b; see also Kato, 2001). In addition, Fitzmaurice considers the increase of the use of negative split infi nitives as evidence of the ‘de-grammaticalisation’ of infi nitival to (Fitzmaurice, 2000a). Other studies looking at infi nitives split by adverbs confi rm the fi ndings of Fitzmaurice (2000b), Calle-Martín and Miranda-García (2009) and Perales-Escudero (2011). In addition, Leech et al. (2009: 263) found that the frequency of occurrence of split infi nitives has increased in both British and American English corpus data, based on results from the BROWN family of corpora. Davies (2010) found that the proportion of infi nitives split with an -ly adverb has increased relative to infi nitives immediately followed by an -ly adverb, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Similar trends are observed in Fischer (2007), whose analysis is also based on the BROWN family of corpora. This overview provides evidence for the first two points mentioned above: split infi nitives have a long history of use, and their frequency of use has been increasing. Despite the increase in the usage frequency of split infi nitives identified in previous studies, which seems to suggest that the variant is not affected by prescriptivism (cf. Leech et al., 2009: 263), the potential influence of prescriptivism on the use of the split infi nitive is still regularly referred to. With respect to this, we fi nd somewhat conflicting statements in the literature. Thus, alongside the evidence suggesting that split infi nitives are more and more frequently used, it is also usually suggested that the use of split infi nitives is constrained by prescriptive concerns. Denison (1998: 242), for instance, observes that ‘a shibboleth of great potency has been the split infi nitive, with speakers and especially writers taking great care to avoid interposing anything between the infi nitival marker to and the verb itself’. Denison (1998: 242) also observes that Visser (1963–1973: Sections 977–982) ‘concedes that the prejudice of grammarians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has kept its frequency very low until recently’. Similarly, Quirk et  al. (1985: 497) note that ‘the widespread prejudice against split infi nitives must not be underestimated, especially with respect to formal writing, and indeed there is no feature of usage on which critical native reaction more frequently focuses’. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 581–582) also note that prescriptivism has affected the use of this variant, as writers and editors tend to avoid it in an attempt to follow the well-known prescriptive rule against it. Calle-Martín and Miranda-García (2009) also suggest that the decrease in the frequency of occurrence of split infinitives may have been the consequence of

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prescriptive pressure against their use. Finally, in relation to split infi nitives, Fitzmaurice (2000a) observes that: This construction is a traditional bugbear of traditional grammarians, and therefore its high profi le militates against an objective assessment of the progress of the de-grammaticalisation of the infi nitive marker. By contrast, the negative split infi nitive – the construction split by a negative operator – has received rather less attention from prescriptivists and has thus remained less obtrusive in speakers’ conscious linguistic behaviour. This type of split infi nitive therefore seems worth further investigation. (Fitzmaurice, 2000a: 172)

This reasoning seems to imply that there is some influence of traditional prescriptivism on the use of the split infi nitive in speakers’ conscious linguistic behavior, which in turn makes it a problematic candidate for an investigation of linguistic processes such as grammaticalization, which operate below the level of consciousness. While this is not explicitly stated, such a reading is not impossible based on Fitzmaurice’s observations above. A more plausible interpretation would be that Fitzmaurice does not believe that the process of de-grammaticalization is influenced by prescriptivism and instead seems to avoid the issue altogether. It is unclear what exactly is meant by the argument that ‘its high profi le militates against an objective assessment of the progress of the de-grammaticalisation of the infi nitive marker’. It has been argued that, because negative split infi nitives have not been the subject of prescriptive usage commentary, it can be assumed that speakers will not be affected by prescriptive ideas about their incorrectness. However, this kind of reasoning is further complicated by the fact that the opposite has also been observed, namely, that the proscription on split infi nitives is especially strong in contexts where the negator not is placed between to and the verb (Curme, 1931, cited in Perales-Escudero, 2011: 316, 327). All of this serves to illustrate the inherent contradiction in observing that prescriptivism has both affected and not affected the use of the split infi nitive. With respect to the fi nal point mentioned above, while split infi nitives continue to be covered in many usage guides, the general impression is that the proscription may have weakened during the 20th century. As early as 1927, usage commentators disagreed with the claim that split infi nitives are errors, and pointed out that their use accords with the natural flow of the English sentence structure (Bryant, 1946; Curme, 1927). In certain cases, for instance, the position of the adverb does not merely affect the stylistic aspects of a sentence but also its meaning. In such cases, a split infi nitive has a meaning that is different from a non-split infi nitive, as exemplified by the opposition between He failed completely to understand it and He failed to completely understand it (Curme, 1927: 341). Curme thus notes that the reason for the growth in the occurrence of the split infi nitive, despite the opposition to its use, is its ‘intrinsic merit’

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(Curme, 1927: 342). Similarly, Malone (1941: 52) observes that the split infi nitive ‘is rare in popular speech, its use being chiefly literary’ and that ‘its professional standing has grown better’. All of this suggests that a more detailed approach is needed to resolve at least some of these contradictions, which I attempt to do in what follows. A more detailed approach would also involve a consideration of linguistic constraints on the use of split infi nitives. First, it has been noted that split infi nitives are more common after modals such as ought to (Quirk et al., 1985: 496) or quasi-auxiliaries such as going to and have to (Quirk et  al., 1985: 496; also cf. Fitzmaurice, 2000a). Secondly, with respect to adverb type, degree adverbs are more likely to occur between to and the verb (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García, 2009; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002: 582). Thirdly, the function of the adverb has been found to constrain the occurrence of the split infi nitive, but observations on the exact nature of this constraint are contradictory (cf. Calle-Martín & Miranda-García, 2009: 354–355; Quirk et al., 1985: 497). Finally, in terms of ‘stress and rhythm effects’, Calle-Martín and Miranda-García (2009: 356–359) fi nd that particular stress patterns seem to be preferred, largely to avoid the repetition of too many stressed and unstressed syllables in a sequence (see also Crystal, 2006: 126). In addition to these constraints, Perales-Escudero (2011) suggests that the use of the split infi nitive is more likely to be the result of specific collocational patterns arising from its use, such as to better understand in contrast with to understand better. 4 Methods and Data 4.1 Language precept: Data and analysis

The precept data come from 70 usage guides of American English published between 1847 and 2014 (see Primary Sources). About half of these usage guides are found in the Hyper Usage Guide of English database, compiled at Leiden University during the Bridging the Unbridgeable project (Straaijer, 2015; see also Straaijer, 2018; Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2018). 2 The remaining usage guides were obtained through an additional search process, mainly through online libraries such as the Internet Archive and HathiTrust (for more on the selection process and representativeness of the sample of usage guides, see Kostadinova, 2018a). A total of 59 entries on the split infi nitive were identified in the 70 usage guides. The treatment of the split infi nitive in each entry was subsequently classified into three mutually exclusive categories, on the basis of whether the feature was found acceptable or not. The analysis of the entries consisted of distinguishing three types of treatment: acceptable, if the entry approves of the use of the split infi nitive in all contexts; restricted, if the entry approves of the use of the split infi nitive only in certain contexts; and unacceptable, if the entry does not approve of the split infi nitive.

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Entries in Examples 1 through 3 are examples of acceptable, restricted and unacceptable entries, respectively. This classification approach builds on similar categories of treatment used in previous studies (Albakry, 2007; Creswell, 1975; Kostadinova, 2018a, 2018b; Peters & Young, 1997; Tieken-Boon van Ostade & Ebner, 2017), and has proven successful in identifying overarching patterns of treatment and changes therein, despite the fact that it leaves out fi ner details of analysis (for a more detailed analysis of the treatment of the split infi nitive in American usage guides, see Kostadinova, 2018a). (1) I consider it my calling to dispel the myth that it’s against the rules to split infi nitives. It’s fi ne to split infi nitives, and sometimes, I split them when I don’t have to just to maliciously make a point. […] For some reason, many grammarians in the nineteenth century got the notion that because it is impossible to split infi nitives in Latin, it shouldn’t be done in English either. But notions change over time, and today almost everyone agrees that it is OK to split infi nitives, especially when you would have to change the meaning of the sentence or go through writing gymnastics to avoid the split. (Fogarty, 2008: 55–56)3 (2) For the hyper-critical, ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ should be ‘to go boldly …’. It is good to be aware that the insertion of one or more words between ‘to’ and the verb is not strictly speaking an error, and is often more expressive and graceful than moving the intervening words elsewhere. But so many people are offended by split infi nitives that it is better to avoid them except when the alternatives sound strained and awkward. (Brians, 2003: 194–195) (3) The particle to is an inherent component part of the infi nitive, and is strictly inseparable therefrom, in precisely the same way that the prefi xed syllable which assists to form a compound word (as inconstant) is a necessary part of the compound. But this to belongs to the present infi nitive only, and properly fi nds no place in such expressions as ‘He was fool enough to have risked his good name.’ Despite the hundreds of uses of this method of expression, it is a blunder: the sentence should read ‘fool enough to risk.’ It is, too, on the grounds of inseparability that the split infi nitive […] is so reprehensible. ‘To dance gracefully’ should not be transposed into ‘to gracefully dance.’ (Vizetelly, 1920: 210)

4.2 Language practice: Data and analysis

The data for the analysis of patterns of use of the split infi nitive was extracted from the full-text data4 from COHA (Corpus of Historical American English; Davies, 2010–; see also Davies, 2012) and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English; Davies, 2008–; see also Davies, 2009, 2010) using Python scripts (see Appendix for more details

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on the practical procedures). I conducted the following types of analysis: a text-linguistic analysis, a corpus-level variationist analysis and a textlevel multifactorial analysis. The text-linguistic analysis consisted of establishing the normalized frequency of occurrence of split infi nitives across time periods and genre sections in the two corpora. This included all cases of infi nitives split by one element (i.e. usually an adverb or the negator not), which yielded 10,062 split infi nitives in COHA and 63,079 in COCA. The corpus-level variationist analysis consisted of identifying the proportion of split infi nitives in relation to the total number of possible environments in which a split infinitive could occur. This kind of analysis presupposes the existence of linguistic variables, which usually have two different realizations but the same propositional truth value (Labov, 1972); this kind of analysis has therefore most commonly and widely been used in sociolinguistic research on phonological variables. While the concept of the linguistic variable has been successfully applied to syntactic variables as well (e.g. Hinrichs et al., 2015; Nevalainen, 2000, 2006; Sankoff, 1973), it must be noted that this application is not without problems (cf. Lavandera, 1978). For the present analysis, I start from the assumption that the two variant realizations of an infi nitive modified by -ly, that is, split vs non-split, are equivalent in a propositional sense. On the basis of this assumption, I establish the linguistic variable modified infinitive (Table 6.1). Cases with other adverbs, or with the negator not, were excluded, because these introduce further constraints on the choice of the split vs non-split variants, such as the type or number of modifying elements. For instance, for the negator not there are two possible variants, not to go and to not go. This is different from infi nitives modified by adverbs, where three variants can be distinguished: quickly to go, to quickly go and to go quickly. Thus, in order to eliminate the potentially confounding influence of such constraints, I apply the variationist analysis only to cases of infinitives modified by an -ly adverb. There were 108,399 cases of modified infinitives in COHA, of which 6037 were split. In COCA there were 40,053 split infi nitives, out of a total of 130,855. The text-level multifactorial analysis consisted of identifying occurrences of split infi nitives in individual corpus texts and analyzing the potential influence of several constraints. 5 This analysis was inspired by Biber (1988) and, more concretely, Hinrichs et  al. (2015), on the Table 6.1 The variants of the variable MODIFIED INFINITIVE

Non-split, i.e. prescribed

Split, i.e. proscribed

MODIFIED INFINITIVE

Example

to + V-infinitive + -ly adverb

to improve significantly

-ly adverb + to + V-infinitive

significantly to improve

to + -ly adverb + V-infinitive

to significantly improve

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assumption that if prescriptive concerns influence certain texts, then this influence will be manifested in relation to more than just one prescriptively targeted feature. The analysis consisted of applying a multifactorial binomial logistic regression model to ascertain whether the odds of an infi nitive being split can be predicted by the occurrence of other prescriptively targeted features in the text. This is essentially a variationist analysis as well, but it goes beyond plotting the proportions of the two variants. As a result, a number of steps were taken to produce a data set appropriate for the multifactorial analysis. First, the occurrences had to be manually inspected to remove ‘noise’ hits. The reason for this was that the automatic disambiguation used to extract occurrences of modified infi nitives would inevitably produce false positives because not all adverbs immediately preceding or following a to-infi nitive necessarily modify that infi nitive. The initial 130,855-case data set (used for the variationist analysis described above and based on the variants established in Table 6.1) was too large for such an analysis, so a smaller data set was used. This involved randomly sampling 10% of the entire COCA data set of modified infi nitives. The smaller data set was manually inspected to remove noise hits such as Examples 4 and 6 below and to keep cases of premodified and postmodified infi nitives, illustrated in Examples 5 and 7, respectively. Further fi ltering of the modified infi nitive cases was carried out to remove those that occur in very short or very long corpus texts, because in these texts the additional features mentioned above were often not present, resulting in a data set with a large number of zeros. To avoid this, only corpus texts between 5000 and 9999 words were used. Finally, multiple observations of modified infi nitives from the same text were removed, in order to satisfy the assumption in a binomial logistic regression model that all observations in the data set are independent. (4) Some senators, disturbed by the plight of ill workers, tried unsuccessfully to put the Labor Department in charge of the entire program. (2005, magazine, COCA) (5) Extrapolating from this limited but authentic sample, one can see from studying commercial publications the effects of a second triage, when an established writer such as Birago Diop selects from among the riches of oral tradition which tales he wishes widely to publicize as representative of his culture. (1995, academic, COCA) (6) The bowl’s high level of production and detail of execution indicate the care invested in this work of art and suggest that divergence from classical sources was intentional, an adaptation of antique imagery and themes to accommodate specifically Byzantine meanings. (2008, magazine, COCA) (7) However, when issues of context and institutional and interpersonal processes are included in research questions, it is not clear whether

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researchers used research methods and/or theoretical frameworks that would enable them to capture systematically the link between mind, history, and society. (2011, academic, COCA) The resulting data set used for the binomial logistic regression model thus consisted of a set of observations on each occurrence of a modifi ed infi nitive, classified as either SPLIT or NON-SPLIT, as the dependent variable. A number of predictors were included in the model. Internal predictors included the type of adverb and the length of adverb relative to the verb. The type of adverb was established based on the classification found in Biber et al. (1999: 552–559), and included the following levels: ADDITIVE-RESTRICTIVE, DEGREE, LINKING, MANNER, STANCE and TIME adverbs. The length of adverb was established based on the number of syllables of the adverb and was operationalized in relation to the verb. Three levels were distinguished: SHORTER than the verb, SAME as the verb and LONGER than the verb. External predictors were year and genre. The range of years covered by the COCA corpus was 1990–2012, while the genres included were ACADEMIC, FICTION, NEWSPAPER, MAGAZINE and SPOKEN. Finally, the prescriptivism-related predictors were the normalized frequencies of several prescriptively targeted features in each corpus text in which a variant of the modified infi nitive was identified. These features were the following: ain’t; sentence-initial and/but; the use of singular data; the use of hopefully to mean I hope that; the use of less with plural nouns; discourse particle like; non-literal literally; negative concord; the use of none with plural nouns; passives; these kind of/these sort of; try and instead of try to; shall; and whom (see Appendix for more details).

5 Results 5.1 Change in precept

The analysis of precept I conducted based on usage guide entries on the split infi nitive revealed that usage guides do not all uniformly disapprove of the variant. The three categories of treatment used in the analysis, acceptable, restricted and unacceptable, were identified in essentially equal numbers across the set of 59 entries analyzed. Plotting these categories across decades (Figure 6.1) sheds some light on how the treatment of the split infi nitive in usage guides has changed over time. The figure shows that unacceptable entries tend to be found in usage guides published in the 19th century. Restricted entries start appearing around the turn of the 20th century and are found in usage guides published throughout that century. Finally, the figure also shows that acceptable entries are found mostly in usage guides published in the second half of the 20th century.

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Number of guides

12 10

Treatment

8

Acceptable Restricted

6

Unacceptable

4 2 0 1840

1860

1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Decade

Figure 6.1 Distribution of categories in the collection of entries on the split infinitive found in American usage guides

Before I discuss the significance of these trends, I address potential issues in the analysis. First, Figure 6.1 shows that the number of guides is lower for the 19th century. However, there is evidence to suggest that this may in part be a consequence of general usage guide publication trends (cf. Kostadinova, 2018a: 95; Tieken-Boon van Ostade, in progress). Secondly, as I already mentioned above, this kind of analysis is admittedly a rough indication of the treatment of split infi nitives in usage guides, because it inevitably leaves out specific details. However, evidence of the treatment of the split infi nitive reported in previous studies to some extent confi rms the patterns identified here. Albakry, for instance, analyzes the treatment of the split infi nitive in 18 usage and style manuals of American English, and fi nds that the split infi nitive is not a strongly dispreferred feature, but ‘seems to have a medium position on the scale of prescriptiveness’ (Albakry, 2007: 19). Kostadinova (2018a: Chapter 5) analyzes additional aspects of the treatment of split infinitives in American usage guides and fi nds that, in comparison to other prescriptively targeted features, entries on the split infi nitive express many positive attitudes. It could thus be concluded that, if we were to take usage guides as a reasonable indication of general prescriptive attitudes to language, such attitudes towards the split infinitive have changed during the 20th century. This, in turn, suggests that the prescriptive pressure against the use of the split infi nitive may have weakened. I take up the significance of this point in relation to the main questions of this chapter, as well as all the results taken together, in Section 6. 5.2 Language practice 1: Split infinitives across time and genre sections

The results confirm that the split infi nitive has increased in frequency over the course of the second half of the 20th century. This increase has

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been identified based on data from the BROWN family of corpora (Fischer, 2007; Leech et al., 2009: 263), and my analysis shows a similar increase: the normalized frequency of occurrence of the split infi nitive (based on an analysis of infi nitives split by one word in both COHA and COCA) has increased from 16.95 words per million in 1950 to 194.22 words per million in 2012. As mentioned in Section 4.2 above, the rate of occurrence of split infi nitives reveals only one aspect of their use; a more comprehensive analysis will also consider the total number of cases in which an infi nitive could be split (cf., for example, Biber et al., 2016). Consequently, I will focus on the results of this analysis in more detail. The variationist trends plotted in Figure 6.2 show the proportion of split infi nitives to the total number of modified infi nitives in the context of the variable modified infinitive, that is, an infi nitive modified by a single -ly adverb. The increasing trend is evident, especially for the period between 1990 and 2012. In addition, since the set of all possible cases of modified infi nitives contains some false positives as a result of the automatic classification of cases, the trends presented in Figure 6.2 are actually a conservative indication of the proportion of split infi nitives within the set of all modified infi nitives. This is confirmed by the distribution in Figure 6.3, which plots the results from a manual analysis of a randomly selected subset of the data presented in Figure 6.2. Figure 6.3 shows that the increasing trend is even more pronounced. The distribution of split infi nitives across genre sections of the two corpora is given in Figure 6.4. The COHA data show very low proportions of split infi nitives; the situation is different for COCA, where we see that the proportion of infi nitives split by -ly is on average roughly a quarter of all cases of modified infi nitives. Differences across genre show that the spoken section has the highest proportion of split infi nitives, followed by the newspaper and academic sections, results which in part support the fi ndings in Perales-Escudero (2011). 1.00

1.00

0.75 Variant non-split

0.50

split

0.25

Variant non-split

0.50

split

0.25

0.00 1800

Proportion

Proportion

0.75

0.00

1850

1900

Decade

1950

2000

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

Year

Figure 6.2 Occurrence of split infinitives with lexical -ly adverbs across time (COHA: n = 6037; COCA: n = 40,053) as a proportion of the total number of modified infinitives (COHA: n = 108,399; COCA: n = 130,855)

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1.00

Proportion

0.75 Variant non-split

0.50

split

0.25

0.00 1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

Year Figure 6.3 Occurrence of split infinitives with lexical -ly adverbs across time in COCA (n = 2053) as a proportion of the total number of modified infinitives (n = 4925)

1.00

1.00

0.75 Variant non-split

0.50

split

0.25

Proportion

Proportion

0.75

Variant non-split

0.50

split

0.25

0.00

0.00 FIC

MAG

NEWS

Genre

NF

ACAD

FIC

MAG

NEWS

SPOK

Genre

Figure 6.4 Occurrence of split infinitives with lexical -ly adverbs across corpus sections (COHA: n = 6037; COCA: n = 40,053) as a proportion of the total number of modified infinitives (COHA: n = 108,399; COCA: n = 130,855)

5.3 Language practice 2: The split infinitive and other prescriptively targeted features

In this fi nal section, I turn to the analysis of how the occurrence of split infinitives in individual texts correlates with the use of other prescriptively targeted features in those texts. As explained in Section 4.2 above, the data set for the analysis was extracted from COCA, and included all cases in which a to-infi nitive was modified by a single -ly adverb. Each occurrence of a modified infinitive was classified as either SPLIT, if the -ly adverb occurred between the marker to and the verb, or NON-SPLIT, if the adverb was placed either before to or after the verb. Thus, the realization of the variant of SPLIT modified infi nitives as opposed to NON-SPLIT modified infi nitives was modeled as a binary dependent variable in a

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binomial logistic regression model. A number of predictors were used in the model, as explained in Section 4.2, including the internal predictors type of adverb and length of adverb, the external predictors year and genre, and a number of prescriptively targeted features. The statistical model used to explore the relationship between the occurrence of split infi nitives in a text in relation to other prescriptively targeted features was a binomial logistic regression model. The analysis was conducted in R (R Core Team, 2013), based on the procedure for selecting a model outlined in Levshina (2015: Chapter 12). The best model was selected, using backward stepwise selection based on the lowest AIC value. In addition, the function drop1 was used to check which of the predictors contributed significantly to explaining the variance in the model. The model thus selected is given in Table 6.2. As the model shows, a number of the prescriptivism-related predictors did not survive the model-fitting stage. Only the predictors that are significant in explaining the variance in the dependent variable were thus included in the fi nal model. Even though this model did not show significant improvement in the concordance index C, as compared to a model with all predictors included, the simpler model was selected, and the value for C was considered acceptable (cf. Levshina, 2015: 259).6 As suggested by Levshina (2015: 274), bootstrap validation was applied to the model to check for over-fitting, using the function validate in the package rms (Harrell, 2018). The model was refitted 200 times, and the optimism scores were low for all the goodness-of-fit statistics. I now turn to an examination of the results for each predictor in the model. Starting from the internal predictors, the model shows that both type of adverb and length of adverb are significant predictors. For type of adverb, the reference level was ADDITIVE-RESTRICTIVE adverbs. This means that the results displayed in Table 6.2 show how likely it is that a modified infinitive is SPLIT in cases in which an adverb is, for instance, a DEGREE adverb, as opposed to cases in which an adverb is ADDITIVE-RESTRICTIVE. So, according to the results, the odds that a modified infi nitive is SPLIT are higher if the adverb is in any of the four categories DEGREE, MANNER, STANCE or TIME, compared to cases in which the adverb is ADDITIVE-RESTRICTIVE. Cases with LINKING adverbs do not significantly predict the likelihood of a modified infinitive to be SPLIT. The second linguistic predictor, length of adverb, was also significant. As explained in Section 4.2 above, here I distinguish between three levels: the adverb is LONGER than the verb, the adverb is SHORTER than the verb and the adverb is the SAME length in syllables as the verb. The reference level here is SAME. Compared to cases in which the length of the adverb is the same as that of the verb, the odds of a modified infinitive being SPLIT decrease by 0.70 when the adverb is LONGER than the verb. In other words, if an adverb is longer than the verb, it tends to come after the verb rather than before. There was no such significant difference for SHORTER adverbs.

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Table 6.2 Binomial logistic regression model for the alternation between split and non-split infinitives modified by one -ly lexical adverb. The dependent variable is MODIFIED INFINITIVE, and the predicted level is SPLIT

(Intercept)

b

Odds ratio

p

−122

0

ø. The items in this chart can be divided into four rough groups, since we are looking at two outcomes (change vs no change) among two groups (interns vs volunteers): (1) changes for which there was a relatively high editing rate among both groups – over 50% for this study; (2) changes for which interns have a high editing rate while volunteers have a low one; (3) changes for which volunteers have a high rate while interns have a low one; and (4) changes for which both groups have a low rate. Each group will be discussed in turn. 3.1 High editing rate among both groups

This group comprises those usage items that editors presumably fi nd the most important to change. In this sample, those items include impact,

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Table 15.1 Editing changes by group Change

Interns Changes/ opportunities

Volunteers Editing rate

Changes/ opportunities

Editing rate

es’ > es’s

4/4

100.00%

0/0

–

-our > -or

6/6

100.00%

0/1

0.00%

-ise > -ize

20/24

83.33%

0/16

0.00%

s’ > s’s

23/28

82.14%

1/2

50.00%

7/9

77.78%

0/3

0.00%

impact > affect

2/3

66.67%

1/1

100.00%

placement of only

8/17

59.10%

2/2

100.00%

which > that

27/49

55.10%

12/16

75.00%

where > in which

acknowledgement > acknowledgment

2/4

50.00%

0/1

0.00%

19/45

42.22%

8/10

80.00%

2/8

25.00%

1/10

10.00%

an h > a h

1/4

25.00%

0/0

the fact that > ø

3/17

17.65%

0/5

0.00%

es’s > es’

1/6

16.70%

0/0

–

towards > toward 's > is

–

and/or > and

1/7

14.29%

0/0

–

over > more than

1/10

10.00%

0/3

0.00%

all of > all

2/25

8.00%

1/4

25.00%

for > since

1/14

7.14%

0/3

0.00%

as > since

1/15

6.67%

0/5

0.00% 10.00%

since > because

1/53

1.89%

1/10

*medial however > initial however

1/65

1.54%

0/0

–

avoidance of initial however

1/81

1.23%

0/11

0.00%

due to > because of

0/17

0.00%

1/1

100.00%

each other > one another

0/6

0.00%

1/1

100.00%

have to > must

0/5

0.00%

1/3

33.00%

persons > people

0/4

0.00%

1/3

33.00%

youth > youths

0/12

0.00%

3/10

30.00%

that which > what

0/5

0.00%

1/4

25.00%

s gen > of gen

4/

–

1/17

5.88%

s gen > attributive

1/

–

0/17

0.00%

only-placement and which vs that. Changing the verb impact to affect had high rates between both groups but few opportunities. Both groups showed a tendency to move only next to the word or phrase it modifies, although the interns made this change just over half of the time. The volunteers, on the other hand, changed it every time, although there were

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only two opportunities to do so. The lower rates among the interns could be a sign that they had not all mastered the rule yet, or it could simply show that they do not all value the rule equally. The change that showed the greatest convergence between the two groups was from which to that as a restrictive relative pronoun. The interns made the change just over half the time, while the volunteers made it three-quarters of the time. This rule also shows the greatest number of changes in absolute terms. Interestingly, this rule seems to be a favorite among American editors in particular; in Verbal Hygiene, Cameron relates an ‘absurd’ story in which British contributors to an encyclopedia react with ‘bewilderment mixed with irritation’ to their American copy editors’ insistence on the rule. Ultimately, the copy chief decided to enforce the rule for the American contributors but not the British contributors, undermining the consistency that the rule was supposed to help create. She concludes that ‘the underlying concern, then was not that the text should be either clear or consistent: it was that people should follow rules’ (Cameron, 1995: 50–52). In his Modern American Usage, Garner similarly notes that Americans care about this rule while the British don’t care about it – or at least care much less about it – saying that ‘British writers have utterly bollixed the distinction’ (Garner, 2009: 807). But as Hinrichs et al. (2015) show, it is not that the distinction is being lost but that restrictive which is being driven out of use in edited English, especially American English, and this change appears to be motivated by the prescriptive rule. They dismiss the idea that this trend is primarily the result of automated grammar checking, since the latest data in their study are taken from the ’90s-era FROWN and F-LOB corpora. These corpora predate the widespread adoption of grammar-checking features in word processors. Hinrichs et al. therefore conclude that ‘prescriptive grammarians were successful at planting the that-rule fi rmly within British and American English editorial practice by the early 1990s,’ adding that grammar checkers are ‘driving the last nail into the coffin of which as restrictive relativizer in written StE’ (Hinrichs et al., 2015: 830). (Although British English is also increasingly favoring that over which, it is lagging behind American English.) They also argue that ‘the infrastructure of prestige, including the educational system and editorial practice, are helping along [the] change’ (Hinrichs et al., 2015: 831, emphasis added). Between Cameron’s anecdotes, Hinrichs et  al.’s data and the data shown here, it seems clear that editors are playing an important and mostly unexplored role in this trend. Importantly, Hinrichs et al.’s study does not distinguish between changes made by original authors and later editors, so we cannot say for sure how large a role editors play in the distributions reported in that study. It seems reasonable to assume, as Hinrichs et al. do, that editors are one factor, along with writing instruction and grammar checkers, although further research will be needed to determine the size of each factor.

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Interestingly, in a discussion between the usage commentator Bryan Garner and the Economist’s language columnist, Robert Lane Greene, Garner argued that this rule’s widespread adoption is part of the justification for following the rule: ‘In American English from circa 1930 on, “that” has been overwhelmingly restrictive and “which” overwhelmingly nonrestrictive. Strunk, White and other guidebook writers have good reasons for their recommendation to keep them distinct – and the actual practice of edited American English bears this out’ (Garner & Greene, 2012). It seems to be rather a logical leap to say that the fact that people follow the prescription is evidence that the prescription is a good one; all it really tells us is that writers or editors or both have successfully adopted the prescription. 3.2 High rate among interns and low rate among volunteers

This group includes the genitive markers for words ending in -s, -or vs -our spellings, -ize vs -ise spellings and where vs in which. I have also included acknowledgement > acknowledgment here, even though the rate among editors is only 50%, since it may also treat British vs American spelling like -ize/-ise and -or/-our. For most of these items, the variation may well depend on whether the editors used a style guide. The interns presumably used one, while the volunteers were not assigned a style guide. Genitive forms and British spellings, for example, have the highest rates of change among the interns, but the volunteers made almost no changes in these areas. Without explicit guidance on which style to use, the volunteers may have opted to leave the text as is. This shows that even though editors value consistency, there is not universal agreement on some style issues. And if a text is already internally consistent, the editor may not feel motivated to make it consistent with other texts unless the publisher dictates it. Similarly, the interns consistently changed the British forms -ise and -our to the American forms -ize and -or. The only exception was four missed opportunities that occurred within one document, indicating that the editor assigned to it may have been unfamiliar with the issue or may have decided to leave them because the document was internally consistent. A style guide may also account for the high frequency at which interns changed the genitive forms -s’ and -es’ (as in Dickens’ and Euripides’), although there were five missed opportunities to change -s’ to -s’s. These changes were considered separately from each other because some style guides make exceptions for classical names or more specifically for classical names ending in -es. Interestingly, some of the missed opportunities appeared in the same documents as opportunities that were changed, meaning that individual interns were not always entirely consistent. Among the volunteers, only one possessive ending in -s was changed,

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while one ending in -us was missed or ignored, possibly because some style guides treat it as an exception. The two groups showed less convergence on acknowledgement > acknowledgment, although there were few opportunities for this change. Interestingly, even though acknowledgement is often held to be a British spelling and the interns changed other British spellings upwards of 80% of the time, they made this change only two times out of four. One item in this group probably does not owe to the use of a style guide, but it may owe to the uniform training of the interns. The interns showed a great deal of consistency in changing where to in which when the relative did not refer to a literal place, as in a marriage where. The volunteers had only three opportunities to make such a change but ignored all of them, showing a significant discrepancy between the two groups. 3.3 Low rates among interns and high rates among volunteers

This group includes toward vs towards, due to and each other vs one another, although the last two items occurred only once in the volunteers’ corpus. The fi rst item, towards > toward, is notable for the raw number of changes and for the number of opportunities. The volunteers made the change over twice as frequently as the interns, and even though the interns’ editing rate does not exceed 50%, it is still 42%. It appears that the interns found this change moderately important while the volunteers found it very important. The change from towards to toward may be another measurable shift in usage that editors have contributed to over the last century or so. A search for towards and toward in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) shows that towards has fallen from about 93% of total use in the 1810s, to about 50% in the 1860s, and then to about 9% in the 2000s (Davies, 2008– a). To measure editors’ contribution to this decline, I counted the instances of towards and toward in the unedited and edited manuscripts, which are presented in Table 15.2. Towards actually appears more frequently in the unedited manuscripts, but the edited manuscripts achieve a distribution much closer to that found in recent decades according to COHA, with the volunteers nearly equaling the distribution found in recent decades in COHA. A search in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (Davies, 2008b), which Table 15.2 Towards and toward in the original and edited text Interns

towards

Volunteers

Original

Edited

Original

45

26

10

toward

34

55

% towards

56.96%

32.10%

8 55.55%

Edited 2 16 11.11%

Practicing Prescriptivism 301

is composed primarily of unedited online material, shows that toward occurs 40,106 times in the American portion of the corpus, while towards occurs 37,186 times, or 48.11% of the time. If the editing rate of the volunteers is comparable to the editing rate of professional editors generally, then this suggests that editors play a huge role in the shift from towards to toward in American English. 3.4 Low rates for both groups

The remaining changes are dominated by low rates, low opportunities or both. There is also significant variation between the two groups, with several changes made occasionally by one group but not at all by the other. In some cases, as with spelling out contractions with is, changing all of to all, changing as to since or since to because, or avoiding sentence-initial however, it appears that neither group cares very much about the prescriptive rule. Or, more specifically, it seems that some individuals care about these rules while others do not or that even the individuals who care about them are not consistent in their changes. In one instance, a sentence-initial however was replaced with unfortunately, although it is unclear if the rule was the motivation for this change, and in another instance, a medial however was moved to the beginning of the sentence, violating the traditional prescription. In the fi nal pair of changes, which involve avoiding s genitives with inanimate objects by changing them to either of genitives or attributive nouns, I was able to count the number of opportunities for the volunteers but not the interns due to the amount of text to sift through. However, since the interns had just over five times as much text but only made these changes about five times as often as the volunteers, it seems reasonable to assume that the interns’ rates were not significantly different from the volunteers’. But again, it seems that neither group valued this rule much. 3.5 Summary of changes

There do not seem to be many clear patterns to the types of constructions that editors changed; the changes are essentially a grab-bag of orthography, usage and grammar. But within that grab-bag there are a few items that suggest widespread attention among editors, since editors usually change their proscribed forms, whether the editors are interns or professionals. Those items are all ‘old chestnuts,’ namely impact, only and which vs that. Perhaps toward vs towards should be included here as well. The frequency of these items in the authors’ original text gives them a high enough profi le to draw attention from grammarians and editors. At least for some items, editors have converged in their practice and, in the case of which/that and towards/toward, editors may well be contributing to a substantial change in their distribution, at least in printed sources. In

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addition to these old chestnuts, we see a notable effect on prose for those items that typically appear in style guides. Editors apparently also converge in their practice for spelling items like -ize/-ise, -or/-our, and morphological items like the genitive of nouns ending in -s. Perhaps the most surprising result of this study, though, is the degree to which the editors did not converge on a single set of forms. That is, they do not reach consensus on which forms to avoid or which optional variation to eliminate, with significant variation both between the two groups and within them. Although this study does not compare individual editors, if editors are changing an item around half the time, then that tells us either that each editor is inconsistent or that some editors are more consistent than others. Either way, this shows that they are not a homogeneous group driven by a single set of values. Or, rather, although they share certain values like clarity, consistency and correctness, those values are manifested in different ways. Recalling McArthur’s (2001: 4) remark that ‘there are few beings on earth more prescriptive and single-minded than copy-editors and proof-readers,’ we may conclude from this study that this is not the case. Whether or not copy editors and proofreaders are among the most prescriptive beings on earth, they certainly are not singleminded. Even the interns, who all worked for a single department and were taking classes in the same editing minor, showed a wide range of editing behavior, with some changes made nearly all the time and others made almost none of the time. 4 Role of Editors in Standardization

Editors clearly play a standardizing role that has not been fully explored, even if it is a smaller role than anticipated. Editors reduce variation and codify certain forms, based mostly on traditional usage prescriptions, and to some degree increase the distance between educated usage and edited usage. For now, though, Cameron’s description of editors’ role in the standardization process seems rather apt: ‘The activities of copy editors are crucial, because they help to sustain the illusion of a uniform standard language’ (Cameron, 1995: 39). The reduction in variation is easiest to see for those items upon which editors converge the most, like towards > toward and which > that. But even for those items that show much less convergence, the variation will be reduced, if just a little, any time that editors change a proscribed form to a prescribed form. Even if editors do not eliminate but merely reduce variation, they are nevertheless contributing to the standardization process. And as Cameron says, ‘The inherent variability and mutability of language ensures that standardization can never be “fi nished”’ (Cameron, 1995: 39), meaning that editors will always fi nd new variants to standardize. But it is worth examining more closely the relationship between the most popular edits and Standard English. In nearly every case the editors

Practicing Prescriptivism 303

are dealing with optional variability, presumably within Standard English. Returning to Cameron’s formulation, the grammar, usage and spelling changes presented in this study obviously do not compare to the dialect variation found in English during the early stages of standardization. Few of the edited items examined in this study deal with clear-cut errors; instead they tend to be those that Anne Curzan labels ‘stylistic prescriptivism,’ since they treat variation within Standard English (Curzan, 2014: 33). Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, since the original authors of the pieces used in this study are presumably all well educated. Cameron’s term ‘hyperstandardization’ seems apt. Although her description of it as ‘a mania for imposing a rule on any conceivable point of usage’ (Cameron, 1995: 47) may be exaggerated, when we look at the self-professed values among editors of clarity, consistency and correctness, it is difficult to see what is unclear or inherently incorrect about many of the variants that editors avoid. It seems that the desire for consistency, not correctness, is the most important justification for the high rates of editing for some items, especially spelling and genitive forms. In this regard, Cameron’s (1995: 39) label ‘peripheral’ seems fitting for characterizing the ways in which copy editors are involved in standardization. In fact, some of the most popular edits, including the that/which rule and the avoidance of towards, turn out not to be attempts to slow language change (and thus preserve some notion of Standard English) but rather moves that drive language change. This conflicts with the typical image of editors as gatekeepers. For instance, Erin Brenner, the former editor of the industry newsletter Copyediting, envisions copy editors fighting a rearguard action against language change, although she admits that ‘it’s really like holding back the tide’ (Brenner, 2012). But in the case of towards and restrictive relative which, editors may in fact be leading the charge. The role of editors in changing language has implications for how we regard writing that has passed through their scrutiny. Studies that attempt to contrast prescriptive and descriptive approaches often appeal to ‘actual usage’ as an authority. But when they rely on computer corpora, they often fail to consider the effect of editing on the texts used in those corpora. Snyder (2007: 5), for example, writes that ‘one way to discover the rules of standard English usage is to describe what writers actually do in printed, edited English.’ Her study is designed to address the problems of instruction and assessment of English usage by ‘go[ing] right to the source of English language arts instruction: the English language itself’ (Snyder, 2007: 1), but it assumes not only that English has a single source but that the language we fi nd in this source is the language of writers, unfi ltered and undiluted. Snyder dismisses the opinions of usage writers such as Fowler or Garner, writing, ‘These experts, though, are often only prescribing what they think people should do, and they do not necessarily describe what educated writers actually do’ (Snyder, 2007: 3); however,

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because of editorial intervention, a corpus study does not always describe what educated writers actually do either. A corpus, then, is not the source of the English language, but merely one manifestation of highly standardized English, one that conforms more closely to some usage prescriptions than other varieties. The problem of deciding what is correct based on what is found in print is illustrated by a discussion mentioned earlier between usage-guide writer Bryan Garner and author Robert Lane Greene. Greene tries to discredit the that/which rule and, although Garner admits that Greene’s argument is convincing, he says, ‘I maintain, however, that the practice in the best-edited American English is to confi ne “which,” as a relative pronoun, to either nonrestrictive uses or uses that follow prepositions’ (Garner & Greene, 2012). That is, Garner points to the evidence found in edited writing as justification for the rule. The argument quickly becomes circular: the rule should be followed because editors are following the rule. Circularity may be a natural part of the standardization process, since new utterances are measured against the norm of pre-existing utterances, but this seems to be an unsatisfactory way to determine whether a rule should be followed or not. Any corpus-based study that attempts to evaluate prescriptions based on so-called actual usage must be clear about whose usage is being evaluated; in other words, it must be able to take such editorial intervention into account. And beyond the implications for those trying to study ‘actual usage’ is the effect of editing on those who, perhaps unconsciously, try to use the English language that they encounter in edited writing. We often fi nd within descriptive approaches an assumption that usage that occurs ‘naturally’ (the language that people unselfconsciously use) is innately superior to ‘artificial’ usage (the language that people produce when they are consciously following the rules). Some authors have pointed out that this assumption is not necessarily justified and have even argued that the distinction between natural and artificial language is a false dichotomy (for example, Cameron, 1995; Joseph, 1987, this volume). Cameron writes, ‘If “natural” here means something like “observed to occur in all speech communities to a greater or lesser extent”, then the kind of norm-making and tinkering linguists label “prescriptive” is “natural” too: not all languages and varieties undergo institutional processes of standardization, but all are subject to some normative regulation’ (Cameron, 1995: 5). Editors may be driven to impose extra correctness and uniformity on a text, but it is impossible to measure how much self-editing authors do before the editing stage. The same prescriptive values that motivate editors to make the changes that they do presumably also motivate authors as they strive toward the norm of Standard English, even if they don’t follow all the rules that copy editors do. It may be impossible to disentangle usage prescriptions from unselfconscious usage, but it is important to acknowledge the potential role of editors in such ‘unselfconscious’ usage.

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5 Conclusion

Editors clearly play a standardizing role, but that role and the way in which they play it is more complex than previous scholars have assumed. What stands out most from examining actual editorial practice, as done in this study, is the degree to which editors differ from each other. Within popular discourse about prescriptivism, prescriptive rules are thought to be well defi ned, while experts like editors are thought to enforce those rules. In reality, the usage that editors notice is much more diverse, and their own practice in emending that usage is much more varied. Their values of clarity, consistency and correctness go beyond a simple-minded detection of errors, and it would be imprudent to characterize all editing as mere hyperstandardization. Editing for clarity, structure, logic and so on is also an important, perhaps more important, part of an editor’s job. Some informal, unpublished studies have indicated that a greater degree of editing correlates with increased reader engagement and higher reader perception of the professionalism of the writing (for example, Mathewson, 2010; Vultee, 2012). Whether editors value the enforcement of prescriptive rules less than has been presumed or whether editors are more idiosyncratic in their choices of which rules to enforce, they clearly differ from each other to such an extent that we cannot simply lump them together as a homogeneous group. For them, as well as for language users generally, language and values are too complex for such a simple formulation. I believe that further studies should evaluate the efficacy of copy editing, especially the value of following some of the more common usage rules. Copy editing is a time intensive and costly stage in the publishing process, and editing practice is frequently the result of tradition or other unexamined assumptions about reader expectations and how readers engage with text. Although some linguists have called for a more scientific approach to prescriptivism (see, for example, Liberman, 2008), involving research methods from fields such as psycholinguistics applied to problems of usage, so far it appears that there has been little research in this area. Such a scientific prescriptivism (if this is not an oxymoron) would be especially valuable to editors, who are frequent targets of layoffs at book and newspaper publishers, since it may help them to justify the importance of their work. I believe that ethnographic studies of editors could also be valuable. The values discussed here are mostly inferred from the changes that editors make; an in-depth study of editing as it occurs in the real world could further elucidate the values that drive the prescriptive practices of editors. Such studies could even persuade more linguists to take editing and prescriptivism seriously as social and cultural phenomena and not simply try to debunk them as flawed and unscientific approaches to language or dismiss practitioners of prescriptivism as cranks and pedants. It is my hope that this chapter may help to close the gap between prescriptivism and descriptivism or at least to illustrate the inadequacies of such binaries.

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Note (1) The number varies from three up to seven, adding notions such as completeness, concision, coherence and comprehensibility. See, for example, Einsohn (2006: 1), which lists four.

References Brenner, E. (2012) Protecting the tower or holding back the tide? Copyediting, 17 July. See https://www.copyediting.com/protecting-the-tower-or-holding-back-the-tide/ (accessed 28 February 2013). Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene. New York: Routledge. Curzan, A. (2014) Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, M. (2008a) The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): 400 million words, 1810–2009. See https://corpus.byu.edu/coha. Davies, M. (2008b) The Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries (GloWbE). See https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/. Einsohn, A. (2006) The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Garner, B.A. (2009) Garner’s Modern American Usage. New York: Oxford University Press. Garner, B.A. and Greene, R.L. (2012) Which language rules to flout. Room for Debate: The  New York Times, 27 September. See http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/ 2012/09/27/which-language-and-grammar-rules-to-flout/. Hinrichs, L., Szmrecsanyi, B. and Bohmann, A. (2015) Which-hunting and the Standard English relative clause. Language 91, 805–836. Joseph, J. (1987) Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages. London: F. Pinter. Liberman, M. (2008) Prescriptivist science. Language Log, 30 May. See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=199. Mathewson, J. (2010) A Fourth of July lesson in the value of editors. Writing for Digital, 4 July. See http://writingfordigital.com/2010/07/04/a-fourth-of-july-lesson-in- thevalue-of-editors. McArthur, T. (2001) Error, editing, and World Standard English. English Today 17, 3–8. Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1999) Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. New York: Routledge. Snyder, D.W. (2007) A corpus-based approach to determining standard written American Usage. Dissertation, Brigham Young University. Vultee, F. (2012) Measuring the value of editing to online readers. The Convergence Newsletter, March. See http://sc.edu/cmcis/news/convergence/v9no2.html.

Index

AAVE 59 acceptance 128, 135 active voice 268, 279–282, 286 adverbs without -ly 84–85, 87–88 Algemeen Nederlands Verbond (ANV) 127 Allen, John 179 Alstergren, Venise 207 American Editors 10, 264–288 English 74–76, 80–82, 174, 179–180, 257, 264, 299, 301 grammars 77, 78, 82–83, 85–86, 90 influence 199–200 prescriptivism 89 spelling 180, 201, 295 usage guides 266–269 American English (AmE) vs. British English (BrE) 75–76, 80–83, 268, 270–271, 273–274, 276–278, 286–287, 298–299 Americanism 82–83, 90n12, 183–184, 199, 257, 260 Americanization 240 Anabaptist 8–9, 231–233 community 245 culture 241 symbolic function of language 242 See also Mennonite anti-authoritarianism 195, 202–205 anti-intellectualism 196, 209, 238 anti-prescriptivism 5–6, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 49, 54, 206 Aramaic 214 ARCHER. See corpus artificial. See natural vs. artificial. Australian 9 cultural cringe 204–205 culture 194–195, 202–203 education 200–201

English 195, 198–199 prescriptive linguistic traditions 204 prescriptivist 197 societal rules 203 spelling 201 vernacular 196 Austronesian 33 authenticity 44 speaker 22 authoritarianism 18, 158 authority appeals to 63 discourse 162 epithet 128–129, 131, 133–134 in language 62, 129, 148, 198, 255 rebelling against 163 Bahasa Indonesian (BI) 33, 39, 42 Baker, Robert 186 Basovskaya, Evgenia 149 Battistella, Edwin 47 Bex, Tony 252, 256, 261 Bible, the 213, 233 bilingualism 20, 26, 216, 235, 237, 242–243 binary/binaries challenging 253 classification 2, 10 compromise between 66 of descriptivism and prescriptivism. See descriptivism – vs. prescriptivism inadequacy of 4, 5, 10, 15–28, 305 middle ground 46-49, 51, 61, 66 opposition 96, 113 terms 2, 5, 46 value of 4 Black English trial 27 Blake, Norman 252 Borneo 33 307

308

Language Prescription

Boullions, Peter 79 borrowing 149, 159, 202, 240, 258. See English–borrowing Brexit 209 Bridging the Unbridgeable 101 British editors 9, 271–287 education 176–177 English 74–75, 81, 179, 251–252, 260, 264 grammars 77, 85–86 novels 264, 270, 286–287 spelling 180, 184, 299–300 usage attitudes 174 usage guides 268 BROWN. See corpus Burchfield, Robert 251–252, 257, 259 burglarize/burgle 174, 180–184, 187–188, 190–191 Calle-Martín, Javier 98 Calvin, John 219 Cameron, Deborah 1, 207–209, 212, 244, 292–293, 298, 302–304 Cantonese 27 Can We Help? 194, 197 Catchick, Sir Paul Chater 27 Chambers, J. K. 84 Chicago Manual of Style 266, 272 Chinese 27 Christian language attitudes 215 linguists 219 prescriptivism 217, 223 views 8 clarity 10, 266, 268, 287, 293, 295, 302–303, 305 Chomsky, Noam 17, 21, 24, 29n5, 29n7, 29n9 Churchill, Winston 252 COCA. See corpus codification 89n1, 123, 147, 212, 302 COHA. See corpus collective nouns 198–199 colloquialization 195, 206 Columbia Guide to Standard American English 267, 269 commerce 42 communication, ideal 59 communism 149–150, 166 community-based language research (CBLR) 34

complaint tradition 198–199, 202–203, 206, 212, 218 concepts thin and thick 18, 23, 28–29n5 Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics 50 concision 10, 266, 279, 287–288 consistency 10, 293, 298–299, 302–303 contingent polysemy 46, 53–54, 57, 60, 62, 66 copy editing 10, 77, 264, 266, 292, 294–295 corpus ARCHER 74, 89n9 BNC 179–180, 186–187 BROWN 99, 107, 180 COCA 48, 102, 105, 113, 115, 179, 181 COHA 74, 102, 113, 300 GloWbe 53, 300 Google Books 48, 50, 58, 74 Helsinki 74 NOW 179–80 correctness 3, 7, 53, 61–64, 198–199, 302 conditions 15 ideology 212–213, 217–218 judgements 9–10, 54, 64, 67, 199, 253–254 responding to 7–8 study of language 62, 155, promoting 65, 150, 152, correlation–causation 77, 97, 113 Crystal, David 52, 206, 251–253 Curme, George 100–101 Curzan, Anne 96, 201, 303 Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa 34 Davies, Mark 99 deep structure 19 democratic ethos 206 Denison, David 99 descriptive/descriptivist approach 8, 33–34, 79, 89, 43, 49–54, 124, 176, 205–206, 304 ideology 15–19, 20, 22, 26–28, 34–36, 49, 54-66, 206 interference 64 linguist 15, 18–19, 22–26, 34, 36–37, 42-43, 47, 50–51, 73 perception of 53, 56 descriptivism 5–6 complexity of 48–49

Index

definition 4, 15–16, 33, 46–48, 50–51, 73 as a foundational value 20 goals 50 methods 52–54 natural 5, 16–17, 24–25, 36, 84–85, 209 pure 5, 19–21 scope 51–52 variety 49 vs. prescriptivism 2–4, 5, 7, 15–19, 21–22, 22–24, 36–38, 43–44, 46–49 54–55, 60, 205, 245 dialect differences 128, 214, 223, 231, 235, 242, 293 enregisterment 80 standard / nonstandard 58, 65, 175, 185, 195–196, 207–208, 218; see British vs. American prejudice against 243 selection 31–32, 147, 195, 293 variation 32–33, 41, 188–89 dictionaries 26, 59 67fn2, 67fn4, 124, 133, 141, 142fn4, 201, 206, 236, 256, 261 Dictionary of Modern English Usage 9, 251–252, 257, 261, 267 analysis of 253 theoretical background of 260 Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 1700–1800 124–125 digitalization 74 diglossic speech community 235, 237–238, 242 discrimination gender 259–260 against nonstandard speakers 43, 80, 83, 88, 207–208 diversification 220–222 celebration of 223 double morality 160 double negative. See multiple negation Drake, Glendon F. 33 Dutch prescriptivism 121, 124, 129, 135–136, 142 speakers 135 standardization 122–123 usage guides 123 each other/one another 267–268, 276–277

309

editing changes 77, 187, 99, 112, 276, 281, 296–301, 303–304 practices 96, 264, 266, 286, 292-293, 295, 305 editors 9–10 264, 292–293, 298 consensus 302 diverse 305 evaluative 282, 286–287 impact on Standard English 78, 99, 264–265, 293 gatekeeping role 149, 265, 303 language analysis 275–279, 280–281, 287 prescriptivist 62, 96, 99, 266, 276, 279, 302 educated vs. uneducated 56, 67fn6, 80, 83–84, 87, 89, 96, 174, 179, 185, 189–190, 206–207, 260, 276, 303 education 7, 24–25, 28, 33, 39–42, 64, 123, 145–147, 151–160, 176–177, 200–201, 212, 238 language of 58–59 Edwards, John 3, 216 egalitarianism 194, 203 empiricist 52–53 English African American Vernacular. See AAVE American vs. British English. See American English (AmE) vs. British English (BrE) Black. See AAVE borrowing 150, 156, 232, 237–239 nineteenth century 76–78, 81–83, 195–196, of the Pennsylvania German speech community 243–244 varieties 57–59, 80, 83–84, 99, 175, 185, 189, 194–195, 204, 257 Englishman, Englishmen 256–257, 261 enregisterment 80–83 epithets 7, 76, 79 development of 132–133 explicit 129–131 evaluative 121–122, 124, 126–127, 128–129, 132–133, 135 prescriptive 124–125 ethnolinguistic ideology 146 etymology 197, 254–255 existential there 264, 269–270, 283, 285–286

310

Language Prescription

false dichotomy/false bifurcation 3, 5, 18, 43, 304 Fascism 258 feminine designation 259 feminism 259–260 fieldwork 33–34, 38, 236 Finegan, Edward 219 Fischer, Henry Lee 240 Fischer, John 22 Fischer, Olga 98 Fischer, Roswitha 99, 107 Fitzmaurice, Susan 46, 49, 98–100 formal 85, 96–97, 99, 128, 149, 150, 177–178, 185, 194, 196, 218, 231, 244, 267 Fowler, H.W. 9, 251–252 on gender 259–261 linguistic judgements 253 on nationalism 257–258 on politics 258–259 Fox, Charles 79 French borrowing 258 Garner, Bryan 48, 51–52, 58, 61–64, 180, 267, 269, 298–299, 303–304 gender 259 genitive form 295, 299, 301 Germanisms 133, 135 Gilman, E. Ward 267–269 good writing 60, 266 Görlach, Manfred 74 governmental language institutions 151 teaching 156 grammar authority 128–129, 132–134, 136, 158, 167fn7, 254, 275, 279 books 26, 73–75, 77–78, 80–82, 85–87, 89fn1, 96, 122–123, 147, 236, checkers 298 and idiomatic expression 254 normative 87, 89n9, 96, 125–126 grammarians 19, 99, 100, 129, 195, 255, 298 grammatical ideology 96, 112 Greene, Robert Lane 56, 299, 304 Halliday, Michael 241 Hatcher, Anna Granville 21–22 Haugen, Einar 216 have gotten 80–83

Hebrew 221 Hendrickx, Ruud 124 Henry, Matthew 214, 222 hermeneiaphobia 22 Heydon, Georgina 208 High German 235–236 Hill, Archibald 21 Hobongan grade-school curricula 40–41 language loss 39–40, 42 people 32–33 Huddleston, Rodney 99, 115n1, 176, 185–186, 189, 191 human nature 16 Hume, David 19–20, 25, 29n6 Hume’s Guillotine (Law) 15, 19–20, 28 hypercorrection 185 hyperstandardization 264, 293, 303, 305 Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) 176, 186, 192n2 Iamartino, Giovanni 261 ideals 37, 41, 42, 98, 194, 196, 217–218, 220, 292 identity construction 183–184, 189 demarcating 8, 38–40, 67fn6, 191 national 4, 26–27, 149–150, 157, 184–185, 190, 204–205, 257–258 professional 15, 47–48 religious 4, 8, 225 social 83, 155–156, 189, 191, 242–245 ideological meaning 256, 259–260 idiom 253–254 idiomatic expression 253–256, 260–261 Ignorance Studies 208 illiteracy, supposed 150, 155–156 indexical fields/values 22, 56-57, 67fn6, 81, 83, 85, 87–88, 183–184, 189–190, individualism 240–241 community before 245 in-group/out-group 57, 65, 155, 174–177, 184, 189, 191, 243 ipse dixit 38, 134, 136 It’s ME Who Creates the Language 155, 158–159, 162–163 Jablonski, Jonas 147 Jespersen, Otto 18–19, 252 judgement

Index

acceptability 76, 87, 101–102, 105, 128, 174, 182, 187–188, 267, 273 and age 274, 277–278, 283, 285, 287 based on speech 84, 185, 206, 276 correctness 49, 53–54, 67, 199, 253, introspective 21 moral 3, 19–20, 26, 29n6, 76, 84, 87, 160, 266, 268, value 5, 9, 19–20, 22, 25–26, 28–29n6, 124–125, 136, 192, 210, 244, 257 Kroch, Anthony 96 Kuyper, Abraham 221 L1 See under language: native Labov, William 27–28, 76, 178 Principle of Accountability 75 Principle of Error Correction 89 sociolinguistic monitor See under sociolinguistic: monitor language advice publications 122–123, 126. See usage guides. community 3, 7-10, 25, 28, 33-34, 35, 40, 145, 147, 153, 164, 175, 178, 206, 213, 227, 233, 235–236, 238, 241–242, 276 conservation. See language – documentation. conservative vs. innovative 51, 75, 80, 81–83 contact 159, 202, 232 correction ideology 154, 156, 158– 159, 162–163, 165, 212–213, 217–218 Culture 148 decay 156, 158, 160–162 documentation 32, 37, 38–39, 42 endangered 26, 33, 156, 202, 206, 232 identities 8, 173-174, 177–178, 185, 190–191, 243 maintenance 231, 236, 243 native 21, 34, 65, 74, 145–146, 164, 179, 236. See native speakers. planning 32, 146, 151, 153, 154, 156, 162, 166 206 preservation 33–35, 39–40 purism 98, 128, 132–133, 136, 149, 159, 206, 231–232, 244–245, 258 sacred 213–214, 243 surveillance 149, 151

311

language change 6, 21–25, 47, 125, 239–240 criticism of 205 concern for 39, 44n2, 76 diversity 8–9, 26, 38–39, 216, 219–221, 223 drift 237 effects of copy editing on 298–299, 302 inevitability of 222–223 influence of prescriptivism 73–74, 78, 83, 88, 95, 97, 111–112, 125, 303 processes 88–89 language unification, criticism of 165 language variation 2, 217, 231, 239 acceptance of 129–130, 135–136 153, 227, 231, 239 attitude towards 145, 197, 223 condemnation of 124, 126, 135, 153, 158–160, 164, 183–184, 197–198, 200, 201, 212 grammatical variation 78, 101–114, 154, 156, 202–203, 208, 267–268 influence of prescriptivism on 95–97, 99, 113 perceived as error 55–56 spelling 180, 192n4, 201, 294, 299, 301–302 suppression 18, 157, 213, 218 Latin standards 102, 254, 256 Latour, Bruno 16, 25 Levshina, Natalia 109 lexicographer 67, 259, 261 lexicography 256 Lewis, C.S. 242 linguist descriptivist 15, 18–19, 22–26, 34, 36–37, 42-43, 47, 50–51, 73 expert 73, 83, 153, 156, 207 norm-setting 149–150, 153, 164 linguistic constraints on variation 101, 103, 113 predictors 105, 109, 111 uniformity 215, 217–218, 220, 296 linguistics corpus 21, 48, 78–79, 102–104, 179–181 folk 227, 260 forensic 208 generative 20 methods 52–53

312

Language Prescription

Lithuania 145 Lithuanian education 145–147, 151–155, 158, 162–164, 166 grammar basics 157 language authority 160–161, 165 Language Commission 151, 154–156, 167n2 Language Law 162 language planners 159 language variation 150 linguist 149, 151–152, 161 prescriptivism 164 Republic 147, 153 standard 157 teaching correct 152 loanwords 149, 159, 202, 232, 237, 240, 258. See English – borrowing. Louden, Mark 240 Lowth, Robert 18 Lukač, Morana 197 Luther, Martin 219 Lynch, Jack 52–53 Malone, Kemp 252 Mann–Whitney U-test 182, 188 Marckwardt, Albert 20, 80–81 Martyrs Mirror, The 233 McArthur, Tom 58, 292, 302 McWhorter, John 219 Me and My Hero 161–162 Mennonite 8, 213 humility 9, 213, 231, 237, 240, 242, 244 Old Order 232–33, 235–36, 238, 240, 242–45 Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage 63, 237 Meyerhoff, Miriam 201–202, 206, 232, 237 Microsoft Word 294–295 Milroy, James 67, 126, 212–213, 218, 292 Milroy, Lesley 67, 126, 212–213, 218, 292 minority languages 26, 28, 38, 39-43, 206, 232, 242 Miranda-García, Antonio 98 MLA Handbook, The 265, 272 Modern American Usage 267, 272, 298 modernism 16 Moon, Rosamund 256, 259 morphology 35–36, 195, 199, 237, 252, 255, 295

multifactorial analysis 7, 103–104 multiple negation 65, 84–88, 173–174, 176, 185–191, 205, 217, 225, 228, nationalism 1–2, 7, 147, 156–157, 165, 175, 257 native language speakers 21, 51, 37–39 natural vs. artificial 2, 16–17, 21, 23–24, 36, 304 Nature 17, 26 Nederlandse Taalunie 123 Netherlands 122–123 newspapers 75, 77, 79 Noah 222 non-prescriptivist 49–50, 54, 66 nonstandard 84, 174, 232–233 non-standardization 83–85 norm-setters 145–146, 148–151, 153–155, 157, 163 norms 26, 44n4, 28, 84, 96, 112, 125, 145, 150, 203, 212, 276, 304 ‘Not-my-dialect’ theme 188–189 Nunberg, Geoffrey 57, 64, 67n4 Oaks, Dallin D. 222–223 optional variability 67n3, 129–130, 135–136, 303 Ostalgie 160 othering 174–175, 191 ought/is statements 19–20, 37 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 18, 47, 54, 180, 255 Oxford Guide to English Usage 267 Pacific English 206 Parker, Richard, 79 passive voice 112, 114, 264–265, 268–269, 279–283, 286 patriotism 258 Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style 265 Penn, William 233 Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language 240 Pennsylvania German 231–234, 237–239, 243 grammar 241 maintaining 244 Perales-Escudero, Moisés 99 Pergamom, Galen of 28n1

Index

Phatic communication 241 phonology 35, 40 pied-piping 19 Pilcher, Rosamunde 271 Pinker, Steven 47 pluralization 200 polysemy 46, 49 post-standardization 136 Pouillon, Véronique 17 pragmatics 35, 37, 237 precept vs. practice 89, 105–106, 111–113 prejudice gender 260 social groups 57, 84 against split infinitives 99 against vernacular 6 preposition stranding 18–19, 225, 228, 252, 254 prescription 205 pure 209 prescriptive/prescriptivist claims/pronouncements 2, 54, 55, 57, 65, 88–89, 100, 156, 163, 217, 256, 267, epithets 124–125. See epithets. grammarians. See grammarians. practice 1, 32, 38, 64, 66, 96, 146, 154, 162, 165, 175, 252, 257, 264, 292 rules 15–17, 25–26, 59, 63–64, 66–67, 183, 188, 215, 224, 253, 256, 275, 298, 301, 305 tradition 38, 62, 78, 100, 122-124, 145, 149, 173, 204, 253, 305 prescriptivism attitude towards 18, 32, 73, 61, 165, 174, 177–178, 196–197, 204, 214–215, 227, 231, 253, 288 Australian 194 covert 28 definition/characterization 17, 33, 73, 95, 121, 145, 176, 194, 212, 264 Dutch 122–123 vs. descriptivism 4–6, 15, 18, 32–33, 43, 46, 49–50, 52, 124, 205, 303 developed from descriptions 39–41, 43 ideology 95, 122, 145, 147,175, 212. influence on language change 24, 74, 77, 78, 84, 95–97, 111–112 in post-Soviet Lithuanian 161 in the Netherlands 122–124

313

vs. linguistics 6, 46–67. See descriptive / descriptivist – linguist practicing 292. See prescriptive/ prescriptivist – practice. stylistic 95, 112, 264–266, 287, 303 prestige 80, 150, 186, 237, 241–242, 298, progressive passive 74, 77–81 criticism of 76, 79 rise of 75, 77–78 pronoun case following than 264, 266–267, 273–275 relative 18, 281, 295, 297–298, 300, 303–304 pronunciation 83, 123, 154, 178, 195, 197, 199, 200, 201, 207, 209, 218, 255 proscribed variants 6, 8, 38, 55–60, 65, 67n6, 96-97, 112, 154, 156, 180, 185, 296, 301 proscription 78, 98, 186, 220, 245, 253, 267, 270, 275, 282, 286 Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association 265, 272 Pullum, Geoffrey 15–18, 24–26, 99, 115n1, 176, 185–186, 189, 191, 287 Pure Language–Pure Mind 159 purity epithet 128, 131–133, 140 Putussibau 33, 39 quality epithet 128–129 Reflections on the English Language 186 religious beliefs 213 and prescriptive rules 225–226, 241 and language 223–224, 227 Ross, Robert John 19 restrictive clauses 202, 265, 282, 287, 298–299, 301, 304 rules. See prescriptive/prescriptivist – rules. benefit of 64–65 compulsory 203 constitutive and regulative 15–17, 25, 28 hybrid 16–17, 26, 28 knowledge of 188, 191 Russification 149

314

Language Prescription

Safire, William 54 de Sausurre, Ferdinand 15 Saxonism 254, 258 Schele de Vere, Maximilian 180 Scotticism 25–26 Scottish-Irish immigration 81–82 Searle, John 15 Shaw, Geroge Bernard 178 shibboleth 84, 99 Small, Cathy 96 Smitherman, Geneva 59 Snyder, Delys 303 social classes 65, 76, 196, 202, 260, 276 social desirability bias 177 Social Identity Theory 174 socialism 258–259 sociolinguistic 35, 153 markers / stereotypes 41, 178 monitor 201–202, 237 situation 37, 79-80, 235, 276, speaker knowledge 57, 84 sociolinguistics 17, 35, 44n1, 57, 84, 89, 103, 179, 228 Soviet propaganda 165 regime 148–149, 151 Russian language 157 speaker as a language expert 207 good vs. bad 190 identity 173, 177, 191–192 linguistic behaviour 175 native 236 perception 174 persona 176 Spelling Law of 2005 123 split infinitive 6, 95–98, 101, 105, 173, 176, 225, 252, analysis of 108, 110–112 constraints upon 101, 103 increase of 112 in usage guides 101–102, 105–106 negative 99–100 with adverbs 107–109, 115n1 Standard English 6, 28, 55, 57–58, 65–66, 176, 201, 293, 302–304 standard language ideology 57, 212, 227, 292 standard languages 6, 24–25, 41, 145, 147, 156, 166, 195, 212 Standard Chinese 27

Standard Dutch 124 Standard French 175 Standard Lithuanian 147 standardization 24, 42, 67n3, 84, 136, 146–148, 152, 153, 164, 213, 231, 232, 292–294, 296, 302–305 Steiner, George 216 stereotypes 83–84, 178, 208, 212, 260 stigmatization 65, 83–88, 173, 177–178, 191, 257, 268, Strang, Veronica 29n5 Strunk, William 16–17, 266, 269 style guide 142n2, 156, 265, 272, 287, 299–300 influence of 271 Subject/Society 16–17, 25, 35 supralocalization 85 Sydney 196 syntax 35–36, 41, 103, 195, 200-201, 237, 243, 255, 286 false 85, 87 system epithet 128–129, 131, 133 taboo language 26, 204–205, 209n4, 232, 256 text-linguistic analysis 103 there is/there was existential there 269–270 plural 84–88 Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 1–2, 114 Tottie, Gunnel 96 Tower of Babel narrative 213–216, 224, 227 blessing interpretation 220–223 curse interpretation 219–220 curse vs. blessing interpretation 216–217, 225–226 tradition 1–2, 7. See eeprescriptive/ prescriptivist – tradition. Umbrella Movement 27 uneducatedness theme 188–190. See educated vs. uneducated usage actual 20, 33, 37, 42, 54, 67, 83, 89, 96, 98, 99, 152, 176, 182, 186, 195, 198, 255, 261, 270, 303–304 as an authority 67, 255, 303 correct. See correctness.

Index

formal. See formal vs. informal. guides 2, 9, 46, 48, 96, 101, 106, 123, 251, 256, 265, 272, 275, 279, 287–288 as an authority 52, 63, 123, 135, items / problems 62, 121, 124, 127, 173, 176–177, 183, 191, 195, 265, 296. See prescriptive/ prescriptivist – rules. use epithet 128–129, 135 Ussher, George N. 267

in language 15, 125–126, 288 Van Dale Online Dictionary 124 variation. See language variation. variationist analysis 103–104, 107 variety epithet 128 Veblen, Thorstein 21–22, 29n9 verb conversion 180 verbal hygiene 206, 232, 244, 298 verhoodelt Englisch 243–244 vernacular universals 84–85 Visser, Frederik 99

valorizing prescribed forms 3, 60–61, 63–65, 156 values 2–3, 10, 20, 49, 66, 83, 89, 121122, 125-127, 157, 162, 166, 175, 194, 196, 208, 213, 227, 240–242, 252, 256, 266, 282, 288, 293, 299, 302 commitment to 4, 9 definition of 3

war on wordiness 266 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 196 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 20, 57 White, Elwyn Brooks 16–17, 269 White, Richard Grant 83 Williams, Bernard 18 Wise Words correspondence 197–200

315