LINGUIST List 26.1009
Fri Feb 20 2015
Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Ling; Socioling: Curzan (2014)
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 20-Oct-2014
From: Vitek Dovalil <vitek.dovalil
ff.cuni.cz>
Subject: Fixing English
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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
Page Updated: 20-Feb-2015