Notes on the founders of prescriptive English grammar. Beal popularized the idea under historical linguists, that the purely prescriptive and descriptive points of view are better to be seen as the end points of a continuum rather than a dichotomy.īryan, William Frank. In the chapter “Grammars and Grammarians,” Beal provides an overview of 18th- and 19th-century prescriptivism from a sociohistorical perspective. Another useful commentary on prescriptive grammar is Pullum 2004.īeal, Joan C. This is addressed in general terms in Huddleston and Pullum 2002 (cited under Reference Works), Beal 2004, Klein 2005, and Crystal 2010 (cited under Reference Works) with respect to 18th-century English grammars in Hodson 2006, Straaijer 2009, and Wilton 2014 and with respect to dictionaries in Mugglestone 2016. The strict separation between prescriptivism and descriptivism as applied to works of grammar and usage has in recent years been questioned and is increasingly seen as artificial, reductive, and a hindrance to a complete and nuanced understanding of usage. Comments on prescriptive grammar seem to have started with Bryan 1923 and Jespersen 2006. And since the investigation of linguistic prescriptivism by linguists is a kind of meta-study, the study of prescriptivism could possibly only arise when linguistics had become sufficiently self-aware. Although language had been prescribed for centuries, it seems that the modern, linguistic concept of prescriptivism could only emerge when descriptive linguistics had become established as a scientific discipline, notably in the wake of the lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure in the early years of the 20th century. The study of (English) prescriptivism is mainly a 21st-century phenomenon and has predominantly been conducted by scholars from the fields of philology, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. The present article focuses mainly on English prescriptivism, that is, studies on prescriptivism as practiced in the English-speaking world and pertaining to the English language. Technically, a prescription only tells one what should be done, whereas a proscription tells one what should not be done, but the two are often subsumed under the former term, almost exclusively so by nonlinguists. The noun prescription usually refers to a single instance of prescriptivism, or to put it more simply, a prescriptive rule. The adjective prescriptive is also used with this meaning, though more often in the phrase prescriptive grammar-works that are contrasted with academic, descriptive grammars. The noun is used to refer to those individuals practicing prescriptivism, whereas the adjective refers more generally to the adherence (of a person or work) to prescriptive concepts or ideals, often as an opposite to descriptivist, though this stark dichotomy is now seen by linguists as somewhat reductive. The term prescriptivist is used both as a noun and as an adjective. It is useful to briefly mention how these terms are used, and how they relate to each other. Next to the term prescriptivism, the terms prescriptivist, prescriptive, and prescription occur in the literature on the subject. This ideology and its practices are now usually ascribed to nonlinguists or nonacademic linguists, whereas modern academic linguists, following Saussurean tenets, restrict themselves to the study and description of the structure of language and its natural use. The term prescriptivism refers to the ideology and practices in which the correct and incorrect uses of a language or specific linguistic items are laid down by explicit rules that are externally imposed on the users of that language.
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