At the 17th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, one of the plenary papers will be on prescriptivism. The speaker is Anne Curzan, from the University of Michigan, and her paper will be called “Prescriptivism: More Than Descriptivism’s Foil”. The … Continue reading
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On the subject of what is called singular they (Everyone has their off-days) Mittins et al. write that Jane Austen “uniformly employs this usage”. The authors refer to S.A. Leonard’s Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage (1929) here, where we … Continue reading
Thanks to Paul Bennett for this one: And Dennis Baron drew an e-card for Henry Fowler on his 150th birthday in the Web of Language.
Kate Wild sent us a link to a wonderful little item on Youtube in which Stephen Fry gives his views on prescriptivism. We hope you will enjoy watching it. Please let us know if there are any more such Youtube films … Continue reading
We are looking for images that will help to give a visual illustration of prescriptivism. There are of course pictures of Henry Watson Fowler, the author of Modern English Usage, but what else is there that we could use?
The French-speaking world is a rather ‘monocentric’ linguistic community and prescriptivism has been an important part of the discourse on the French language for centuries. My contribution to this blog will be to share some information about purism in France … Continue reading
We are currently compiling a bibliography of prescriptivism. There are of course various publications we know about, such as the following: Bennett, Karen (2009) ‘English academic style manuals: a survey’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8: 43-54. Bex, Tony … Continue reading
Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots and Leaves (2003) deals with punctuation, while Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926 and later editions) deals with grammar and lexis. Do we find usage guides in fairly equal numbers for all linguistic fields, spelling, punctuation, grammar, … Continue reading
One of the few introductions to sociolinguistics that includes a discussion on prescriptivism is Mesthrie et al.’s Introducing Sociolinguistics (2nd ed. 2009, Edinburgh University Press). On p. 110, the book defines prescriptivism as “the dominant ideology in language education [which] … Continue reading
Whether more linguists are getting interested in prescriptivism is hard to say as I have no baseline data so to speak. But during the Helsinki Corpus Festival the term prescriptivism occurred quite a number of times. To begin with, there … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 