26.1009, Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Ling; Socioling: Curzan (2014)

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Subject: 26.1009, Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Ling; Socioling: Curzan (2014)

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Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 13:48:48
From: Vitek Dovalil [vitek.dovalil at ff.cuni.cz]
Subject: Fixing English

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2400.html

AUTHOR: Anne  Curzan
TITLE: Fixing English
SUBTITLE: Prescriptivism and Language History
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Vitek Dovalil, Charles University in Prague

Review's Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Sara Couture

SUMMARY 

This book seeks to explore the phenomenon of linguistic prescriptivism from
the perspective of contemporary English philology in the United States. The
author harks back to several crucial sources, the most important of these
being Deborah Cameron’s “Verbal Hygiene” (1995) and the Milroys’ “Authority in
Language” (1991), the latter published in its fourth edition in 2012. The
whole book is divided into eight chapters including an introduction with an
overarching question: does prescriptivism fail? The first chapter explains the
descriptive-prescriptive binary. Descriptivism is defined as approaches to
language which are interested in the patterns as they “surface in the
structure of a language’s words, sentences, and utterances, including all the
variations in different dialects and registers. Descriptive “rules” describe
regularities in a language variety’s structure that are developed through
analysis of what speakers do” (p. 18). The analysis of prescriptivism starts
with an explanation of the concept of grammar. It emphasizes that its core is
situated in morphology and syntax and not in stylistic and orthographic
issues. The substance of prescriptive approaches is defined by “what speakers
should say or write according to established notions of “good”/ “correct” and
“bad”/ “incorrect” language use”(p. 24). Prescriptivism is analyzed in four
distinct yet interrelated strands which, to some extent, pre-determine the
structure of the book: standardizing prescriptivism, stylistic prescriptivism,
restorative prescriptivism and politically responsive prescriptivism. 

To put it succinctly, the first and second strand of prescriptivism
contributes to the establishment of standard varieties. Referring to the
Milroys, the author points out that standardization does not tolerate
variation. Restorative prescriptivism encourages the use of forms or
structures “purely for the sake of honoring past usage” (p. 36), which is
believed by its supporters to represent a means by which the decline of
language can be prevented or at least slowed down. Politically responsive
prescriptivism is Anne Curzan’s reaction to a challenge of promotion of
inclusive, non-discriminatory, and/or politically correct or expedient usage.
With regard to its consequences as they are observable in American public
discourses, this is a very delicate issue. Taking this into account, the
readers find themselves in a unique sociolinguistic laboratory and experience
the power of this discourse bandying about such words as ‘queer’, ‘Nigger’,
‘Negro’ or other N-words.

The author demonstrates the differences between prescriptivism and
descriptivism by means of many linguistic variables which are realized as
competing variants. This argumentation holds above all for the standardizing
and stylistic strands: pronunciation of the word “often” with or without
“-t-“, the declined and non-declined form of the interrogative pronoun who/m,
the placement of prepositions at the end of sentences, the use of finite verbs
in singular in the agreement with the pronoun ‘they’, contractions of verbal
forms (for example of “to be”), several orthographic variables, punctuation,
the use of the word ‘hopefully’, etc. The analysis of such examples consists
in summing up the essential information about the correct or incorrect
variants from numerous usage guides, dictionaries or grammars, and in their
primarily corpus-based research. The fact that the author differentiates the
corpus-based results on stylistic basis according to the genres increases the
value of her analyses. 

Significant attention is devoted to grammar checkers in the third chapter.
Curzan argues that these checkers represent a new technological version of the
prescriptive grammatical tradition that began in the 18th century. The range
of these comfortable tools seems to have become enormous, although the author
admits that their users may treat them critically and in reflected ways. The
next chapter concentrates on dictionaries as one type of codex. It highlights
their meta-discursive nature with a prescriptive relation to “real” words (pp.
93 or 95). Without putting it explicitly in all details, the author
presupposes social practices of normative kind on the users’ part which may
differ from the codifiers’ intentions on why dictionaries are written. She
identifies two issues: first, which words or structures should/not be selected
and why. Second, there are heavy disputes on which information about the
selected item should be added. The author offers a diachronic perspective, but
the precariousness concerning the perception by addressees is not discussed
(Belica, Keibel, Kupietz, Perkuhn and Vachková 2010). The fifth chapter deals
with nonsexist language reform and its effects. Curzan traces the trajectory
of interventions aiming at achieving gender equality. Adjustments with this
goal are reconstructed in detailed phases of prescriptions designed in the
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (pp. 120-126).
Evidence for their implementation is collected and demonstrated in meaningful
figures afterwards. The sixth and longest chapter focuses on the most delicate
topic of the book – reappropriation and prescriptivism of disparaging terms in
public discourses at the macro level of institutions. As well as the previous
chapters, this second last chapter is very rich in information, but unlike
most of the previous ones, this chapter proffers more methodological impetus.
Several cases decided by US courts show the useful interconnection of a
language problem as it is identified in a local discourse by individual
speakers and its transfer to a court that represents the macro level and
implements the legislation. Concluding remarks in the last chapter reflect the
question to what extent prescriptivism could disappear someday. In Curzan’s
opinion, it is rather unthinkable that this would ever happen.

EVALUATION

>From the methodological point of view, the book shows indirectly how useful it
is to differentiate between two kinds of language-related activities.
Utterances or communicative acts are, on the one hand, generated and perceived
(language production and reception). On the other hand, these utterances
become objects of processes in which they are managed (Nekvapil 2009: 1).
These two processes described by the crucial verbs “generate” and “manage”
complement one another. It is clear that the whole discourse on prescriptivism
consisting of metalinguistic activities represents language management.
Moreover, prescriptivism is one of the best examples of ‘behavior towards
language’ as it appears in discourse, which is the most accurate definition of
language management (Nekvapil 2009: 2, Dovalil forthcoming). From this point
of view, it is quite obvious to integrate the prescriptivism into
sociolinguistics and to take it for one of – as I would even dare say – the
central research fields of this discipline. Hence, the reader must share
Curzan’s position defending the status of prescriptivism as a part of the
history (not only) of English as sketched in the second chapter. However, it
is nothing very new. To put it simply: people behave towards language in
various ways, language management does take place every day, it is a very
natural metalinguistic phenomenon, and it does not make sense to try to either
forbid or exclude it. 

Language management theory is not the only theoretical framework that could
have been appropriate for any overview of prescriptivism. Alternative (and in
some respects somewhat older) approaches of language planning would have
fitted as well. It is quite conspicuous that corpus planning is not mentioned
once (for an overview of corpus planning see, for example, Cooper 1989:
122-156, or Kaplan and Baldauf 1997: 38-49, and for prescriptivism 301-303).
Einar Haugen pops up on p. 29 when standardizing prescriptivism is discussed,
but his model of language standardization is not summed up very aptly
(probably having been taken over from the Milroys’ sketch). It is even worse
that Haugen is not listed among the references of Curzan’s book.  In
accordance with his opinion, the author begins with the selection of a variety
as a  candidate for the future standard, which is all right, but she mixes up
the second and the third phase of Haugen’s model. Instead of explaining the
substance of codification – which follows the selection in Haugen’s sense –
she skips it and moves on to the acceptance: “Second, this variety is accepted
by influential people and institutions” (p. 29). Here, the acceptance comes
too early, even before the selected candidate would achieve codification.
Although the basis of Haugen’s standardization consisting in four phases has
been maintained (selection of form – codification of norm –
implementation/acceptance – elaboration of functions), this model has been
perfected both by Haugen himself and by other researchers since the 1960s
(Haugen 1983: 275). And in discussing the problems of what is standard in a
language, it would have been useful to refer to another sociologically based
approach according to which an answer to such questions emerges in an
interplay among influential social forces (Ammon 2003, Dovalil forthcoming,
Dovalil 2006). It is not only codifiers and model speakers or writers who
decide on a socially realistic form of standard, but it is also language
experts conducting different activities from codification and language norm
authorities. It can also be added in margine that if the author’s analyses of
the variables mentioned above were projected into this model, it would emerge
that this kind of research reflects primarily the tie between the codices and
the model texts (drawing upon corpus-based search). 

Anne Curzan confirms indirectly that the practices of norm authorities
(represented for example by teachers or editors) who are expected to correct
the language production of other users are heavily underestimated. Their power
realized in the processes of shaping the standard varieties at the micro level
of everyday interactions is considerable, though. This is not irrelevant,
because this argumentation brings about, among other things, an essential
methodological transformation of the research question: instead of asking what
is/not standard, we get to the question who decides about the standard how, in
which contexts, addressing whom, based on which interests and with which
consequences. And this remark brings us to another methodologically relevant
point – the issue of agency.

Especially in the first chapters of the book, the author uses passive voice or
impersonal formulations which look objective at first glance. Only later,
mostly in the chapters devoted to the gender issue, political correctness and
reappropriation, the agents of the prescriptive interventions into language
and their interests are identified more clearly. Interestingly enough, a very
palpable question aiming at agents (and their interests?) is raised in the
chapter devoted to the grammar checkers: “In critically examining this
powerful new prescriptive force, it is important to ask who is writing the
rules in the MSGC (computational linguists versus educational linguists versus
English teachers) […] As scholars in education have noted, the grammar checker
feeds students’ desire for a right answer” (p. 76). The processes of
reappropriation of disparaging words open interesting opportunities for
membership categorization analysis, which is not applied, though. The approach
in this chapter reminds us of the ethnographic way of thinking. Additionally,
social change comes up more apparently here (p. 148) than in case of the
“objective” looking analyses. Social change is taken into account by Cooper
(1989) in the title of his book; typically enough, he pays very systematic
attention to the mutual interrelation of language planning and social change.
It would have been useful for the author to look at Cooper’s pervasive
research question who plans what for whom, how, etc. (Cooper 1989: 30-42).
Therefore, it is a pity in this context that the question reflecting the
agency – who decides? – comes up only late in the book.

To refer to the metalinguistic and discursive nature of prescriptivism enables
us to point out another useful interconnection. The traditional dichotomy of
descriptive and prescriptive linguistics can be interpreted as a matter of
scale rather than as an antagonistic relation: Klein (2004) argues that a
codex – or, as I would add, any other genre – may be classified as
prescriptive or descriptive by analyzing the intention of its author, its
reception, its style of formulation and the way this text extracts and treats
the data. As far as the formulations are concerned, evaluations and
recommendations are considered to be unequivocally prescriptive. Or, if
codifiers sort the selected data and separate some of them for various reasons
one could not say either that the language use is just described.

Similarly to many other social and linguistic phenomena, the tension between
prescriptivism and descriptivism can hardly be attributed to codices or any
other genres themselves. It is rather the way in which these texts are treated
by users in their social practices which turn an intentionally descriptively
oriented work into its prescriptive counterpart. No matter how intensely the
authors of descriptive grammars declare in a preface that they have written a
downright descriptive work, various teachers, students, editors and other
agents may use such a grammar in a very prescriptive way whenever they need or
have to make a decision about an individual form or word (Dovalil,
forthcoming). Eisenberg conceives of his own grammar explicitly as a
descriptive work: ''Wir verstehen unsere Grammatik als deskriptiv und nicht
als normativ'' [We understand our grammar as descriptive rather than
normative.] (Eisenberg 1998: 8). However, what happens with this grammar in
practice remains to be researched.

If palpable forms of prescriptivism should be showcased, textbooks and all
contexts of second language acquisition could have been mentioned in the book,
to say the least. Here, prescriptivism occurs not only in the expectable
asymmetry between “native” and “non-native” speakers, but also among
non-native speakers themselves when a language is used as a lingua franca
(Dovalil, forthcoming). A very specific set of situations categorizable as
standardizing and stylistic prescriptivism can be recognized in the
sophisticated practices of discrimination against “non-native” speakers
conducted by editorial boards for seemingly linguistic reasons which mask
simple competition, though.

Language management theory also proffers to identify a border between the
prescriptive and the descriptive approaches as a part of the process
systematically. As long as linguists collect data, language use is registered,
recorded, or – to make use of to the term coined by this theory – linguists
note how languages are used. Noting the language use and describing it
(metalinguistic discursive activity) does not have to be the only activity
related to languages, though. Once linguists or other users start evaluating,
they get to the next phase of language management. This evaluation may
oscillate on a continuum between the negative and positive pole, which may
represent extensive discourses as the book demonstrates it. Additionally, the
management process enables to grasp such activities in which the participants
design adjustments and – typically – look for corrections of forms, words or
formulations designated as wrong. These corrections may, in the end, be
implemented, which means that the previous language use has been changed
(corrected). In other words: descriptivism hides behind the first phase of
language management, whereas prescriptivism can be defined as language
management from the evaluative phase on.

Another clarifying aspect of language management theory as well as language
planning encompasses sociocultural (or socioeconomic) elements of contexts in
which these processes take place (language ecology). Taking the dynamic
technological development since the 1990s into account, Curzan shows the
contribution of grammar checkers to the reshaping the concept of language
standards. However, as she admits, the influence of the grammar checkers needs
to be explored more thoroughly. I would like to point out the necessity of
qualitative research on interactions between teachers and their students, or
between book and journal editors and contributors, in which it is possible to
observe who (or what?) is the most powerful language norm authority that
decides about grammatical, orthographic or stylistic problems.

Overall, the book’s predominantly philological orientation seems to somewhat
hamper the author in integrating her very useful research into broader
theoretical interconnections. This missing theoretical framing weakens the
originality both of the research questions and of the results. Language
planning and language management theory as they have been developed so far
show that the issue of prescriptivism has already had its place in
sociolinguistics for a couple of decades.

REFERENCES

Ammon, Ulrich. 2003. On the Social Forces that Determine what is Standard in a
Language and on Conditions of Successful Implementation. In Ammon, Ulrich and
Klaus Mattheier and Peter Nelde (eds.). Sociolinguistica 17 (= Language
Standards). Niemeyer: Tübingen. 1-10.

Belica, Cyril, Holger Keibel, Marc Kupietz, Rainer Perkuhn and Marie Vachková
(2010). Putting corpora into perspective: Rethinking synchronicity in corpus
linguistics. In Mahlberg, Michaela and Victorina González-Díaz and Catherine
Smith (eds.). Proceedings of the 5th Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL 2009).
University of Liverpool. July 20-23, 2009. Fulltext:
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/CL2009/342_FullPaper.doc.

Cooper, Robert. 1989. Language planning and social change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Dovalil, Vít. 2006. Sprachnormenwandel im geschriebenen Deutsch an der
Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert [The Change of Language Norms in the Written
German at the Threshold of the 21st Century]. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

Dovalil, Vít. (forthcoming) The German Standard Variety at Some Universities
in the Czech Republic in the Light of Decision-making Processes of Language
Management. In Davies, Winifred and Evelyn Ziegler (eds.). Language Planning
and Microlinguistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Eisenberg, Peter. 1998. Grundriß der deutschen Grammatik, Bd. 1: Das Wort.
Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler.

Haugen, Einar. 1983. The Implementation of Corpus Planning: Theory and
Practice. In Cobarrubias, Juan and Joshua Fishman (eds.). Progress in Language
Planning. International Perspectives. Berlin and New York and Amsterdam:
Mouton Publishers. 269-289.

Kaplan, Robert B. and Richard B. Baldauf Jr. 1997. Language planning from
practice to theory. Clevedon et al.: Multilingual Matters. 

Klein, Wolf Peter. 2004. Deskriptive statt präskriptiver Sprachwissenschaft?
Über ein sprachtheoretisches Bekenntnis und seine analytische Präzisierung.
[Descriptive instead of prescriptive linguistics?]. Zeitschrift für
germanistische Linguistik 32. 376-405.

Nekvapil, Jiří. 2009. The integrative potential of Language Management Theory.
In Nekvapil, Jiří and Tamah Sherman (eds.). Language Management in Contact
Situations. Perspective from Three Continents. Frankfurt/Main: Peter
Lang.1-11.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Vít Dovalil works on linguistic norms, processes of standardization and
language management theory. He also researches language policy and planning in
the European Union including the case law concerning the language-related
disputes. For more details see also
http://paul.igl.uni-freiburg.de/dovalil/en/?Publications





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