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
10What Do ‘Little Aussie Sticklers’ Value Most?
Alyssa A. Severin and Kate Burridge
11Grammar Next to Godliness: Prescriptivism and the Tower of Babel
Nola Stephens-Hecker
12Linguistic Cleanliness is Next to Godliness – But Not for Conservative Anabaptists
Kate Burridge
Part 4: Judging Correctness: Practitioner Values and Variation
13Fowler’s Values: Ideology and A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926)
Giuliana Russo
14US Copy Editors, Style Guides and Usage Guides and their Impact on British Novels
Linda Pillière
15Practicing Prescriptivism: How Copy Editors Treat Prescriptive Rules
Jonathon Owen
Index
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.
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, 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 Aix-Marseille 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
