frequently reproduced this piece of dialogue seems to have cared, by the way, about the traumatizing parenting going on here, quite apart from the prescriptivism: Mother’s response should be ‘Of course you’re liked – I like you’, instead of reinforcing the child’s low self-esteem while showing her love by nitpicking.
Despite these textbook examples of the supposed futility of prescriptivism, anti-prescriptivists underestimate both the average person’s ability to resist control by linguistic means, and the desire for a degree of regimentation of language. Anti-prescriptivism has the admirable social-political motive of wanting to ignore or reject how language functions to establish social relations and social coherence. Anti-prescriptivists recoil from recognizing and tacitly endorsing hierarchies where speakers get judged in terms of intelligence, morality, etc. based on how they speak, when this is not something within the speaker’s power to change – a contentious point, to which I shall return. However they are also prone to convincing themselves that utterances, as long as they are grammatical, generate their own interpretation, which is identical with the utterer’s intention, à la Chomsky (1964). That conviction is the basis for Pullum’s insistence that the rules he formulates are purely descriptive. No ifs, ands or buts. Anyone who might take them as prescriptive is engaging in deviance.
Proposition 5: Anti-Prescriptivism is Bound up with Incuriosity about How Languages are Formed, Changed and Maintained in their Variability
Linguists are surprisingly ready to accept an idealized view that languages somehow ‘naturally’ coalesce, and incurious about the processes and institutions by which they do so. This is a critique that I have been making since Joseph (1981, 1987), and it is heartening to see a growing number of linguists doing excellent research into documentary sources that reveal details about how particular languages were standardized in printing, in legal chanceries and especially in educational institutions (see, for example, Curzan, 2014; Hickey, 2012; Percy & Davidson, 2012; Rutten, 2016; Rutten et al., 2014; Tieken-Boon van Ostade & Percy, 2016). But all of us are well aware that ours is still a minority interest within the field.
The mainstream view is embodied in Pullum’s use of ‘constitutive’ and ‘regulative’ rules. He never brings up the status of the constitutive rules, how they come about, spread, change or are maintained. Most of the time we let ourselves imagine that the needs of ‘communication’ somehow keep variability in check, when the history of every language for which there is documentation suggests that deliberate interventions have gone into making them what they are and are not. Languages, like nations, are ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983), whose coherence has to be invented and then constantly maintained. A key component of this process is forgetting that they were invented, so that they instead appear primordial and natural. Prescription is the ongoing trace of these interventionist processes. We have much to learn from examining the continuity between standard language and language tout court, both diachronically and synchronically.
Language standards and standard languages have remained outside the mainstream of linguists’ interests because of our ongoing faith in a Nature-based science from which value judgements would be excluded. At the same time, standards of language connect to Latour’s polarization: those who value them consider them necessary to the Subject’s rationality and the cohesion of the Social. Cameron (1995), Taylor (1997) and del Valle (2013) are among those who have shown how the discourse of prescriptivism has been linked to the vision of a modern democratic society in which all citizens can participate without linguistic obstacles.
This is quite different from the usual linguist’s take on prescriptivism as a kind of language feudalism, aimed at establishing and maintaining a vertical social hierarchy. This it would indeed be if it were impossible for speakers to learn the language standards that define good and bad usage – in particular, if some physical obstacle prevented this. Such a physical obstacle could be in the brain, where synapses have been so reinforced as to prevent deep re-learning, or in the neuromuscular system – the extended mind – where a lifetime of accumulated ‘muscular knowledge’ resists being undone (see Joseph, 2018). There is no absolute and universal obstacle: some people do change how they speak and learn new languages, even in old age. But many, perhaps most, find it challenging 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 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 defined 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).
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
