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.
[…] 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 cross-examining 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 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 infinitely 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)Nostalgia
(2)Classicism
(3)Authoritarianism
(4)Aestheticism
(5)Coherentism
(6)Logicism
(7)Commonsensism
(8)Functionalism
(9)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.
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
