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 final 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 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 final 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 findings, 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 final 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 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.
Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism: An Untenable Binary
2Is/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 self-standing; 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
