32.2267, Review: Applied Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Chapman, Rawlins (2020)

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Subject: 32.2267, Review: Applied Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Chapman, Rawlins (2020)

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Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2021 16:15:51
From: Adrian Stenton [a.j.stenton at hum.leidenuniv.nl]
Subject: Language Prescription

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36691757


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-2896.html

EDITOR: Don  Chapman
EDITOR: Jacob D. Rawlins
TITLE: Language Prescription
SUBTITLE: Values, Ideologies and Identity
SERIES TITLE: Multilingual Matters
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Adrian John Stenton, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

SUMMARY

The papers in this volume, which grew out of the 2017 Prescriptivism
Conference in Park City, Utah, all seek to address and unpick the “untenable
binary” of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism (p. 5). The book is arranged in
four parts: “Part 1: Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism: An Untenable Binary”;
“Part 2: Prescriptivism vs Linguistics: An Unnecessary Binary”; “Part 3:
Responding to Correctness: Personal Values and Identity”; and “Part 4: Judging
Correctness: Practitioner Values and Variation”.

The book opens with an “Introduction: Values and Binaries in Language
Evaluation”, by the editors, Rawlins and Chapman. They present a brief
introduction to the topic and a brief survey of each of the chapters. In this
review, I will outline the main ideas of each chapter. 

In Chapter 2, “Is/Ought: Hume’s Guillotine, Linguistics and Standards of
Language”, John E. Joseph sets out “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” (p. 18). Those propositions
are: (1) anti-prescriptivism is based on a false binarism; (2) it is unclear
whether pure descriptivism is possible; (3) prescriptivism inheres in use, not
intent; (4) anti-prescriptivism is based on an impoverished view of language;
(5) anti-prescriptivism is bound up with incuriosity about how languages are
formed, changed, and maintained in their variability; and (6)
anti-prescriptivism is irreconcilable with linguists’ concern for endangered
languages and racial equality. He concludes that “our linguistic descriptions
tend to involve a selection or hierarchization with an evaluative dimension …
We are not, in other words, the polar opposite of prescriptivists” (p. 28).

In Chapter 3, “Inferring Prescriptivism: Considerations Inspired by Hobongan
and Minority Language Documentation”, Marla Perkins picks up on Joseph’s point
that prescriptivism inheres in use, not intent, in her description of the
Austronesian language Hobongan, and discusses the problem of managing
variation in language documentation. One of the issues that she raises is that
“the kinds of information collected often reflect the ideals of linguists that
have arisen through the history of the discipline more than they reflect
realities among members of a language community” (p. 37). This is itself
reflected in the “common availability of certain kinds of information
(phonology, morphology, syntax) and the corresponding unavailability of other
kinds of information (semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc.)” (p. 35),
and in how this results in comprehensive descriptions at the level of the
sentence and smaller units, but little about texts or discourses, which she
describes as “vastly more important to native speakers of a language” (p. 35).
These issues become critical when trying to document a language in order to
maintain diversity and minority rights, for education and literature, and for
governance and commerce, particularly in the context of the increasing use of
Bahasa Indonesian by younger members of the Hobongan community.

Don Chapman closes Part 1 with Chapter 4: “Are You a Descriptivist or a
Prescriptivist? The Meaning of the Term ‘Descriptivism’ and the Values of
Those Who Use It”. In it, he “argue[s] that the terms ‘descriptivist’ and
‘descriptivism’ actually cover many attitudes and practices, but that the
emphasis on a binary opposition effaces much of the complexity in these
attitudes and practices” (p. 66). This opposition starts with describing
descriptivists as “not prescriptivists” (p. 49), and the author notes that,
when applied to others, the term descriptivist is usually negative, but when
applied to oneself it is usually positive. He then goes on to discuss the
nature of descriptivism as an activity: its goals, scope, and methods. This is
followed by an examination of the ideology of descriptivism, in terms of
attitudes towards language and towards prescriptivist practice. His conclusion
is that the binary opposition is unhelpful, as it tends to push both positions
(and practitioners) to the extremities: “The seemingly large difference
between the camps comes from assuming that the descriptivists’ resistance to
the strongest formulation applies equally to all other formulations. An
extreme position is allowed to stand for a moderate position, so that the
moderate position – where there may be much less opposition – is effaced by
the binary” (p. 66). The problem is that the polysemy of descriptivism is not
sufficiently recognised.

Part 2 opens with Lieselotte Anderwald’s Chapter 5, “The Linguistic Value of
Investigating Historical Prescriptivism”, which investigates
nineteenth-century prescriptivism from the vantage point of the historical
linguist. The author takes as a given that “19th century normative grammars
[are] (proto)typical instances of prescriptivism” (p. 89, ftn. 1). The topic
of the chapter is “historical prescriptivism as a potential factor influencing
language change” (p. 73). The example structure presented in this chapter is
the progressive passive (“the bridge is being built”). Although a relatively
rare structure in the nineteenth century, it was nonetheless heavily
criticised in grammar books on both sides of the Atlantic, more so in America.
This criticism lessened as the century progressed, though again less quickly
in America. The main point of this investigation is whether it is possible to
show a correlation between prescriptive forces and actual usage, and the
author demonstrates that, at least in the register of American newspaper
usage, there is indeed a correlation. She then goes on to discuss the uses of
investigating prescriptivism in the process of enregisterment, i.e., the
process of a linguistic form coming to be associated with a particular
register; and in the process of stigmatization, i.e., how prescriptivism was
“instrumental in actively constructing a new register of nonstandard, ‘vulgar’
and ‘uneducated’ speech” (p. 84). 

In Chapter 6, “Examining the Split Infinitive: Prescriptivism as a Constraint
in Language Variation and Change”, Viktorija Kostadinova explores “the complex
nature of prescriptive influence on the use of split infinitives in English”
(p. 95). Her approach is to investigate frequency distributions, but also to
explore “whether the use of split infinitives in specific corpus texts is more
common in the presence of other prescriptively targeted features in those
texts” (p. 97). She used seventy American English usage guides dated between
1847 and 2014 for her precept data, and the Corpus of Historical American
English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English for her data for
analysis. She found that not all of the guides saw the split infinitive as a
problem. With her categories of acceptable, restricted, and unacceptable, her
data suggest that “prescriptive pressure against … the split infinitive may
have weakened” over time, especially during the twentieth century (p. 106). On
the use of the other prescriptively targeted features, she found that for many
of them there was a correlation with an increase in use of the split
infinitive. This leads her to the perennial problem of correlation: Did the
increase in frequency of the use of the split infinitive over time come about
because of the more accepting attitudes of the usage guides over time, or were
the usage guide writers mirroring changing usage over time?

In Chapter 7, “Language Should Be Pure and Grammatical: Values in
Prescriptivism in the Netherlands 1917–2016”, Marten van der Meulen “studies
the evaluative epithets and values found in Dutch prescriptivist publications
in the Netherlands” (p. 121), to assess why both prescriptivist writers and
language users in the Netherlands find prescriptivism not only unproblematic,
but also why prescriptive publications enjoy “immense popularity” (p. 122). In
130 guides from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries he identified three
stances: complete acceptance, complete non-acceptance, and limited acceptance.
After annotating 2,322 epithets, he found that “specific epithets are rarely
bound to specific authors or specific usage items”, and that “specific usage
items do not correlate with specific epithets” (p. 134). However, for those
usage items which were tagged as completely acceptable, they were more likely
to use an authority epithet than the sample as a whole. He found a move from
the dominant value of “the Dutch language should be pure” to “the Dutch
language should be grammatical” over the period from the early 1900s to the
late twentieth / early twenty-first centuries, but also that this seems to be
accompanied by an increase in the acceptance of variation, which itself seems
to be linked to an acceptance of authority (p. 136).

Chapter 8, “Maintaining Power through Language Correction: A Case of L1
Education in Post-Soviet Lithuania” by Loreta Vaicekauskienė, concludes Part 2
with an interesting study that in a sense turns the
prescriptivism/descriptivism opposition on its head. In post-Soviet Lithuania,
Lithuanian “enjoys its official status and continues developing like any other
well-established and thriving linguistic code” (p. 147). The author explores
“how far the mechanisms of standardization can go under post-totalitarian
socio-political conditions fused with ethnolinguistic ideology” (p. 146). One
of her research questions is: “How is the authority of a norm-setting linguist
constructed and maintained?” (p. 146). She finds that “[t]rained linguists,
who are traditionally descriptivists, have been co-opted as prescriptivists to
set language norms and to inspect how speakers observe them” (p. 145), and
that “linguists manipulate language scholarship to use it as a basic argument
for language regimentation” (pp. 145–146). This “authority” of the linguists
is a hang-over from “Soviet social engineering [which] was aimed at erasing
critical thinking” (p. 160), and contributes to the idea that “speaking
Lithuanian is impossible without supervision by linguists” (p. 161).

Part 3 starts with Carmen Ebner’s Chapter 9, “‘Good Guys’ vs ‘Bad Guys’:
Constructing Linguistic Identities on the Basis of Usage Problems”, which
opens with the idea that “we should not only ask ourselves the question of how
acceptable a particular usage feature is, but also how a speaker using that
feature is perceived” (p. 173). She points out that “the public exert [is] an
undeniable, yet unclaimed authority on language usage” (p. 173), and that they
have been largely ignored. Ebner seeks to remedy these two omissions by a
study of two stigmatised usage problems – ‘to burglarize’ and multiple
negation – in terms of both acceptability judgements and a qualitative
analysis of how users of these two problems are perceived. These two problems
were chosen to investigate potential American and British English differences
(‘burglarize’) and standard and non-standard English differences (multiple
negation). Her respondents, all from England, showed a clear association of
‘burglarize’ with American English, contrasting it with the standard variant
in British English, ‘to burgle’. In addition, the respondents found both
usages non-standard in terms of both regional variation and as a marker of a
lack of education. These responses the author analyses in terms of in-groups
and out-groups and the process of othering. She concludes by stating that,
while assessing the acceptability of a usage feature can be revealing, “[t]he
combination of quantitative and qualitative attitudinal data enable[s] a
better insight into how speakers using stigmatized features are perceived and
how these features can be used to portray a specific identity” (p. 191).

In Chapter 10, “What Do ‘Little Aussie Sticklers’ Value Most?”, Alyssa A.
Severin and Kate Burridge note that Australians’ “laissez-faire attitude
towards formal usage seems out of step with the rate at which [they] engage in
prescriptive endeavours” (p. 194), and that “they do this more than any other
English-speaking nation” (p. 197). To investigate this apparent conflict they
analyse 880 pieces of correspondence sent to Burridge as part of her “Wise
Words” segment on the Australian television series “Can We Help?” Setting
aside the 71% that was broadly related to etymology, the authors found 138
queries and 114 complaints, within which they were able to demonstrate a cline
of unacceptability: orthography/pronunciation > morphosyntax > lexis/semantics
(p. 200). They found that the complaints and queries “focus[ed] on the same
usages again and again” (p. 200). They explain the apparent conflict in
attitudes as “while Australians place a high value on anti-authoritarianism,
Australia is also a society that is highly rule-governed” and that
“Australians are proud of these rules” (p. 203). The authors conclude
“linguists cannot ignore or condemn speakers … yet this is precisely the sort
of activity the public expects of them. Linguists find this experience
ill-informed and narrow-minded; the public feels let down” (p. 207).

There follow two revealing chapters examining the role of prescriptive
attitudes in reflecting a religious identity. Nola Stephens-Hecker’s Chapter
11, “Grammar Next to Godliness: Prescriptivism and the Tower of Babel”,
addresses the question of whether it is possible that “the religious beliefs
of some groups of American Christians could affect their beliefs about
correctness norms in English”, and more specifically whether “Christians’
interpretation of the Tower of Babel narrative … might influence [their]
attitudes towards prescriptive grammar rules” (p. 213). Working from a survey
of 181 respondents who self-identified as Christian, the author investigated
their attitudes to the Babel story, on a scale of blessing vs. punishment, and
also their attitudes to five prescriptive/proscriptive grammar rules on a
scale of always important to follow the rule vs. not always important to
follow the rule. She found that there was “a significant relationship between
participants’ interpretation of the Babel text … and their evaluations of
grammar rules” (p. 226), in that “half of the participants surveyed felt some
measure of certainty that the diversification of language at Babel was a
curse, and the majority of those participants adopted a stricter view of
prescriptive/proscriptive grammar rules” (p. 227). The usual caveats about
sample size and correlation are applied. The author concludes that “linguists
would do well to examine the interplay between language ideologies and other
belief systems” (p. 227).

In Chapter 12, “Linguistic Cleanliness is Next to Godliness – But Not for
Conservative Anabaptists”, Kate Burridge investigates a different religious
perspective on language attitudes. She asks how the Pennsylvanian German of
Anabaptist groups (e.g., the Old Order Mennonites and Old Order Amish), a
non-standard, non-written language with no official recognition and no planned
maintenance efforts, nonetheless survives and thrives. The author draws on her
own data gathered over four decades. The speakers “have a distinctive style of
dress that has changed little over the centuries; they drive horse-drawn
carriages, are opposed to modern technologies and refuse all forms of
government aid and insurance” (p. 234). This does not, however, mean that
their language is fossilised; the speakers themselves comment on the variation
and change that they see in their language, in particular with the adoption of
English terms (pp. 231, 237). Indeed, Burridge comments on the speakers’
“relaxed attitude towards the intrusion of English into their language” (p.
238), and believes that this bodes well for its continued survival. The author
concludes that it is the speakers’ “communal mindset” that “conflicts utterly
with the autonomy that is central to the modern sense of identity”.
“Prescribing and proscribing certain forms of language is all about preserving
privilege and power. But in a society that places community above
individualism and subordinates self-will and self-love to the will of God,
there is no sense that any one person’s language can be somehow ‘better’,
‘more correct’ or even ‘more appropriate’ than another’s” (p. 245). This
chapter in particular provides an interesting perspective on the book’s
“untenable binary”.

The final part of the book contains three chapters which focus on what the
editors call “the complex values of the people who could be called ‘pure
prescriptivists’” (p. 9): H.W. Fowler and copy-editors. In Chapter 13,
“Fowler’s Values: Ideology and ‘A Dictionary of Modern English Usage’ (1926)”,
Giuliana Russo aims to “encourage scholars to reconsider his role within the
usage manual tradition” and to “challenge the common view that Fowler is the
epitome of traditional prescriptive values” (p. 253). She points out that
Fowler often, but not always, champions idiomatic expression against standards
derived from Latin, against etymology, and against grammar (p. 254). Having
raised the inevitable question of “how does one determine idiomatic
expression?” (p. 255), she concludes that “[t]o a large extent, ‘idiomatic’
can be equated with ‘usage’ in Fowler’s dictionary” (p. 255). This in turn has
to lead to the question of whose usage the dictionary represents, and through
an analysis of Fowler’s views on nationalism, politics, and gender as
expressed in “some ideologically loaded” entries in the dictionary (pp.
257–260), the author comes to the conclusion that “white, male, British,
upper-middle class speakers’ values constitute the theoretical background of
the Dictionary” (p. 260), so that a ‘normal Englishman … will be just like
him” (p. 261).

The first of the two chapters on copy-editors, “US Copy Editors, Style Guides
and Usage Guides and their Impact on British Novels”, is by Linda Pillière.
She tries to make visible the invisible work of copy-editors, by examining the
differences between British and American editions of some novels and, in
particular, by focusing on four specific usage problems: pronoun case
following comparative ‘than’; the use of ‘one another’ and ‘each other’; the
passive voice; and existential ‘there’ (p. 264). These were chosen as the
author found examples where modifications had been introduced in the
preparation of American editions of the novels. She therefore designed an
online survey aimed at professional copy-editors. After a brief discussion of
style and usage guides and their values, Pillière looks at how the four usage
problems are treated in various guides (pp. 265–270). Her survey involved only
editors who were born in and had lived in the United States (US) or the
British Isles (BI) for more than twenty years, and she worked with the
responses from 133 copy-editors from the US and 48 from the BI. For the first
usage problem (‘than’ plus pronoun) there was no clear-cut division between
the BI and US copy-editors, with a large percentage in each case expressing no
preference between the different versions of the novel (p. 274). This tended
to be the case with all four usage problems. The author was able to conclude
that “US copy editors tended to be more proscriptive”, but also that “many
copy editors had no preference for either edition”, or that “the BI
respondents also preferred the AmE edition” (p. 286), and the copy-editors did
not form “a monolithic group” in terms of US/BI or in terms of age (p. 287).
Overall, the author concludes that “[t]he picture is far too complex to draw
up any simple binary opposition, which in turn suggests that the values of
prescriptivism are also more complex than they may at first appear” (p. 288). 

The final chapter, “Practicing Prescriptivism: How Copy Editors Treat
Prescriptive Rules”, by Jonathon Owen, also investigates the work of
copy-editors. In his case these were student editorial interns at Brigham
Young University. He had some of their manuscripts also edited by
professionals who were unaware of the interns’ edits. The author focused his
attention on revisions which were “clearly motivated by concern for a
traditional item of usage or grammar” (p. 295), and his analysis of the
changes shows that “[t]here do not seem to be many clear patterns to the types
of constructions that editors changed” (p. 301), and “the degree to which the
editors did ‘not’ converge on a single set of forms” (p. 302). Like Pillière
in the previous chapter, Owen found that the editors “are not a homogeneous
group driven by a single set of values” in terms of usage, but rather “share
certain values like clarity, consistency and correctness” (p. 302). He also
suggests that Deborah Cameron’s often-quoted description of “the mania for
imposing a rule on any conceivable point of usage (1995: 47)” may be
exaggerated (p. 303). He concludes that “[w]ithin popular discourse about
prescriptivism, prescriptive rules are thought to be well defined, while
experts like editors are thought to enforce those rules. In reality, the usage
that editors notice is much more diverse, [t]heir values of clarity,
consistency and correctness go beyond a simple-minded detection of errors” (p.
305). 

EVALUATION

The editors of this volume have drawn together a really interesting set of
papers that show the range of approaches that can be taken when accommodating
a prescriptive perspective in a descriptive study of language. I have not even
scratched the surface of these interesting contributions in this all-too-brief
review. Readers working in the field of prescriptivism will find some of the
contributions familiar, but having the range of approaches gathered together,
with each chapter containing its own list of references, makes this a very
useful resource. Newcomers to the field will find it an invaluable starting
point for any number of investigations. John Lyons said that “[i]t should be
stressed that in distinguishing between description and prescription, the
linguist is not saying that there is no place for prescriptive studies of
language” (1968, p. 43). What this volume I think points out is that it is
simply neither possible nor desirable for a descriptivist linguist to eschew
an approach that includes some form of prescriptivism.

REFERENCES

Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal hygiene. London & New York: Routledge.

Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Adrian Stenton is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for
Linguistics, studying number agreement in the species noun phrase, and the
impact of usage guides on writing practice in a corpus of International
Academic English.





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