2. An overview of American and British usage attitude studies

Before discussing an overview of a selection of usage attitude studies, I will provide a brief summary of the three main methodological approaches applied in attitude studies, which have been classified by Garrett (Reference Garrett2010) as the Direct Approach, the Indirect Approach and the Societal Treatment Approach. Using a Direct Approach entails asking respondents in a straightforward manner to express their attitudes towards a particular language item without disguising the study's objective (cf. Garrett, Reference Garrett2010: 39). While this attitude elicitation method has been widely used, it has its drawbacks, as informants may answer questions by providing socially desirable answers (i.e. what they think the researcher would like to hear), rather than expressing their own true attitude (Garrett, Reference Garrett2010: 44). To avoid this social desirability bias, the Indirect Approach is often used. The main difference to the Direct Approach is that the objective of the study is disguised (Garrett, Reference Garrett2010: 41). One of the most famous indirect attitude elicitation techniques is Lambert et al.’s (Reference Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner and Fillenbaum1960) ground-breaking matched-guise test, in which voice recordings of bilingual speakers are used. Participants in a matched-guise test are made to believe that they are listening to different speakers, rather than to bilingual speakers that were recorded twice. The Societal Treatment Approach is less frequently used. Using existing data, such as written texts about language (e.g. letters to the editor, see Lukač, in progress), the researcher is required to deduce the author's attitudes to the object of analysis, which constitutes a delicate undertaking for two reasons. First of all, the researcher has limited access to attitudinal data, which could furthermore have been edited by copy editors, as in the case of published texts. Secondly, the researcher runs the risk of deducing not the author's attitudes, but rather inferring their own (McKenzie, Reference McKenzie2010: 41). For these reasons, the Societal Treatment Approach is not often applied in attitude studies. In the more detailed description of four attitude studies in Section 3 below, I will show examples of the two most frequent approaches: the Direct Approach and the Indirect Approach.

In order to investigate the diverging attitudes towards studying usage attitudes, I have chosen eight usage attitude studies for a contrastive overview illustrated in Table 1 below. For the purpose of comparing the studies, I have drawn up the following criteria:

1. (1) language variety investigated

2. (2) number of usage problems studied

3. (3) attitude elicitation method applied

4. (4) type of participants surveyed

5. (5) size of the sample

6. (6) type of sociolinguistic analysis & variables included.

Despite including only eight usage attitude studies in the overview, I was able to identify further studies which I will, however, not discuss in this paper (e.g. Marckwardt & Walcott, Reference Marckwardt and Walcott1938; Tieken–Boon van Ostade, Reference Tieken–Boon van Ostade2013; Kostadinova, in progress, see also this issue).Footnote ¹ My selection of usage attitude studies aims at localising any potentially diverging methodological developments between the American and British contexts. Besides the four usage attitude studies which I will discuss in detail in Section 3 (Leonard, Reference Leonard1932; Mittins et al., Reference Mittins, Salu, Edminson and Coyne1970; Sandred, Reference Sandred1983; Queen & Boland, Reference Queen and Boland2015), I also included two so-called botheration studies: Hairston's Not All Errors are Created Equal (Reference Hairston1981), and Gilsdorf and Leonard's Big Stuff, Little Stuff (Reference Gilsdorf and Leonard2001). The label ‘botheration study’ derives from the elicitation technique applied, according to which respondents are asked to state how much they are bothered by specific usages. What is special about these two studies is the populations surveyed, i.e. business executives and professionals, which are very different from earlier usage attitude studies such as the ones conducted by Leonard, and Mittins et al. Another usage attitude study I included in the overview is Bryant's Current American Usage (Reference Bryant1962), which is an example of the less frequently used Societal Treatment Approach. Bryant (Reference Bryant1962: xiv) used written records of language use to deduce attitudes towards American English usage, so her study shows how corpora can be used in attitude studies. The last of the attitude studies added to the four studies described above is Albanyan and Preston's What is Standard American English (Reference Albanyan and Preston1998), which stands out due to the enormous size of the survey's sample. With 4,459 students surveyed, the study is by far the largest of all eight included in the overview presented in Table 1.

Table 1:

Overview of eight attitude studies towards usage problems

* Issues of punctuation have been excluded.

A look at the overview in Table 1 brings to light specific patterns. Most of the studies used the Direct Approach to elicit attitudes towards usage: six out of eight. Another interesting feature is the development over time of an increased interest in sociolinguistic analysis. With the birth of sociolinguistics as a discipline in the mid-1960s, sociolinguistic analyses have been gradually and consistently incorporated in attitude studies. Two notable exceptions in this are Hairston (Reference Hairston1981) and Queen and Boland (Reference Queen and Boland2015). A reason for the absence of a sociolinguistic treatment of the attitudes elicited in these two studies can be found in the homogeneity of their samples, which in the case of Hairston (Reference Hairston1981: 795) consisted of mainly old men, and in that of Queen and Boland (Reference Queen and Boland2015: 286) of young undergraduate students. Additionally, a small sample size, such as the one found in Queen and Boland, makes a sociolinguistic analysis difficult. While both sample size and the number of usage problems studied seem to vary in the different studies, the frequency of studies focusing on American English is striking in comparison to those focusing on British English. Why is this so? Before providing a possible answer to this question, I will, however, briefly discuss four usage attitude studies in more detail in the following section.

3. detailed synopsis of four usage attitude studies

3.2 Mittins et al.’s Attitudes to English Usage (Reference Mittins, Salu, Edminson and Coyne1970)

Attitudes to English Usage (Reference Mittins, Salu, Edminson and Coyne1970), a study conducted by W.H. Mittins, Mary Salu, Mary Edminson and Sheila Coyne at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the late 1960s, constituted the starting point for my own endeavour to elicit and assess current attitudes of the general public. The so-called Mittins study was part of a wider research initiative undertaken by the Schools Council for Curriculum and Education in 1966 (Burgess, Reference Burgess and Gordon1996: 55–6). This initiative was set into motion at a time when English grammar teaching had become a heated topic in Great Britain (Hudson & Walmsley, Reference Hudson and Walmsley2005: 595). After abandoning a prescriptive approach towards teaching English, which had come under criticism for being outdated, a new approach was sought by grassroots educationalists and the government. The search, however, proved more complicated than probably anticipated, triggering what Cameron (Reference Cameron1995: 87) calls a moral panic centred on the decay of the English language and subsequently British society. This moral panic has been fiercely reignited most recently with the introduction of a new and controversial spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG) test by the former Education Secretary, Michael Gove (‘Dear Mr Gove’, Reference Rosen2013). Like Leonard's study, the Mittins study shows clear links to the educational sector. Mittins et al. (Reference Mittins, Salu, Edminson and Coyne1970: 3) state that their study's purpose was to provide teachers with an updated insight into current usage attitudes.

Another similarity between Leonard's and Mittins et al.’s studies is their methodological approach. Using the Direct Approach to elicit attitudes, Mittins and his colleagues further drew on Leonard's study when choosing their stimuli sentences, which were slightly modified, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2:

Comparison of stimuli sentences used by Leonard (Reference Leonard1932) and Mittins et al. (Reference Mittins, Salu, Edminson and Coyne1970)

The examples included in Table 2 also show how the usage problems were highlighted in both studies. Yet, the Mittins study included a much smaller number of usage problems, namely 55 compared to the 230 in Leonard's study. Mittins et al. asked their 457 respondents to categorise these 55 usage problems according to whether these sentences were acceptable in four different contexts: formal writing and speech, and informal writing and speech. The researchers, however, limited the contextual choices for five of the stimulus sentences, as they thought the stimuli sentences would not occur in these contexts. For instance, the option formal writing was not available for the sentence Who was he looking for? (Mittins et al., Reference Mittins, Salu, Edminson and Coyne1970: 10). Despite aiming at providing an insight into what educationalists and teachers considered acceptable in the 1960s, the sample used by Mittins and his colleagues also included a small number of members of the general public, which can be seen as an influence of an early interest in sociolinguistics at the time. This is also reflected by Mittins et al.’s limited analysis of the effect of age on usage attitudes (Reference Mittins, Salu, Edminson and Coyne1970: 22–3). For all that, Mittins et al.’s contribution remained the only study focusing on attitudes towards usage problems in Standard British English.

4. Great Britain and the United States: Divided by an attitude

A possible explanation for the difference identified in the preceding section is provided by Lesley Milroy (Reference Milroy2001), who argues that Great Britain and the US are two nations with different language ideologies. Central to her discussion is the so-called ‘standard language ideology’, which encompasses popular notions of one language variety being considered the only legitimate and correct variety (Milroy & Milroy, Reference Milroy and Milroy2012: 30–1). Yet, the factors which influence popular notions of what the standard variety is seem to differ between the two nations. According to Milroy (Reference Milroy2001: 58), accent seems to play a central role in the definition of what standard language means in Great Britain in contrast to the US, while the absence of nonstandard lexical and grammatical features, such as double negatives, is foregrounded in the American context. These two factors are intrinsically connected to the historical development of the two language varieties. Looking back at a history of migration and immigration, language ideologies in the United States of America, including the standard language ideology, seem to be more defined by ethnicity than in Great Britain, where belonging to a specific social class has a greater impact on a speaker's perceived standardness (cf. Milroy, Reference Milroy2001: 61). Received Pronunciation (RP) is considered the ‘standardised accent of English’ (Trudgill, Reference Trudgill, Bex and Watts1999: 118) and is clearly associated with an elite upper class, which does not come as a surprise in the light of the accent's historical connection to public schools (Leith, Reference Leith1997: 56). According to Cameron (Reference Cameron1995: 93), moreover, ‘[i]t is frequently assumed that grammar, at least in Britain, is essentially a symbol of class’ , while she also notes that the middle classes in the UK tend to feel ‘exaggerated respect’ for standard grammar (Reference Cameron1995, 107; see also Tieken–Boon van Ostade, Reference Tieken–Boon van Ostade2013 :10).

If social class plays a crucial role in British society and in how the standard language variety has come to be viewed in Great Britain, this further helps to explain why attitude studies towards usage problems, particularly when they deal with features of grammar, seem to have been less popular in Great Britain than in the US. With a rather rigid social class system in place, academics seem to have somewhat neglected the impact of social class membership in Great Britain on how differences in language use can reflect such social class affiliations. Emphasizing the impact of what is known as ‘classism’ in society, Halliday (Reference Halliday and Pütz1992: 72) argues:

Hence, the lack of usage attitude studies could stem from a fear of possible ramifications of highlighting social differences, which could ultimately have an impact on the existing social class system in Great Britain. Since social hierarchies in the United States seem to be more bound to ethnicity than social class, as Milroy argues in her paper, investigations dealing with attitudes towards disputed, nonstandard usage features do not violate popular notions of what standard language means, whereas in Great Britain such studies might potentially bring to light a divided society in which the majority of speakers is denied access to the linguistic code which breaks the social-class-ceiling. This is in line with Milroy's (Reference Milroy2001: 70) argument for differing national language ideologies between the two countries stating that ‘language varieties indexing race and ethnicity come to the fore in American ideologies, while those that index class recede’.