Describing prescriptivism offers a thought-provoking analysis of prescriptivism from a sociolinguistic perspective. Employing a descriptive approach, this book draws upon a wide range of datasets that address the issue of usage guides and usage problems in British and American English from around 1750 to the present day, examining the functions, popularity, and the assumed influence of usage guides on the language.
In chapter 1, the author begins by providing readers with a comprehensive overview of language rules, usage guides, and usage problems. Chapter 2 presents a historical sociolinguistic outlook of the usage guides in Britain and America that probes deeply into the origin of the usage guides tradition and the development of prescriptivism. Chapter 3 elaborates on how the usage guides and usage problems in the Hyper Usage Guide for English (HUGE) database arise, as well as what the HUGE database contains, providing readers with a chronological overview of selected text types and linguistic features in the HUGE database. Chapter 4 sheds light on the evaluation of linguistic expertise of the usage guides’ writers in HUGE by adopting Chapman's list of ‘explicit credentials’, highlighting their age, profession, and motivation for writing usage guides as factors for variation.
Chapters 5 and 6 clearly show ongoing trends in the prescriptive tradition from the end of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 sets out to compare particular language usage advice with actual usage in the well-compiled British and American English language corpora, considering five selected usage problems in the usage guides such as the treatment of could of, likely. Chapter 6 probes deeply into the language of prescriptivism and posits the importance of the use of normative metalanguage and metalinguistic commentary in the usage guides.
The final two chapters discuss prescriptivism from a present-day perspective. Chapter 7 is devoted to the public linguistic awareness of prescriptivism, embodied in metalinguistic comments and linguistic characterization practices in English literature. It also demonstrates the enormous influence of prescriptivism on the language attitudes and actual use by the general public. In Chapter 8, the author further explores the linguistic awareness of linguists and language professionals, such as editors or novelists, presenting various cases to show that prescriptivism is ‘alive and well’, and argues for the wider application of prescriptivism.
This volume makes a valuable contribution by analyzing different types of usage guides and usage problems in British and American English language corpora over the years. A wide range of cases are presented and supported to provide a comprehensive and vivid discussion of linguistic prescriptivism and language correctness. Therefore, this book can be perceived as an essential reading that contributes to a solid usage guide resource for both students and researchers in fields of prescriptivism, sociolinguistics, as well as English history.
