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Оглавление2Is/Ought: Hume’s Guillotine, Linguistics and Standards of Language
John E. Joseph1
Modern linguistics began with Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) modernist intuition that a language is a system of values.2 These values are not self-standing; rather, each is generated by its difference from every other value in the system. They are conceived as semiological values, not moral ones, and we linguists perform our professional identity by asserting a binary distinction between our descriptivism vs a moralistic prescriptivism that, if you display it, keeps ‘you’ from being one of ‘us’. Identity – national, religious, professional – is inherently Saussurean, in that our categories of belonging have meaning for us only as long as we know who we are not (see Joseph, 2004).
Geoffrey Pullum’s characteristically brilliant paper, ‘Ideology, power and linguistic theory’ (2004 [2006]), explains how the gap between descriptivists and prescriptivists has to do with our different understanding of rules, by invoking a distinction introduced by John Searle (1969):
I begin by taking it for granted that there are conditions we might call correctness conditions for natural languages. […] They are constitutive, not regulative. […] Modern descriptive linguists try to figure out from the available evidence the principles that constitute the language being described. […] But of course prescriptive rules are not intended to be constitutive. They are intended to be regulative. English is assumed to be already defined in some other way, or not to need any definition. The prescriptivist’s rules are deliberately making recommendations about the ways in which you are recommended to use it or not to use it. (Pullum, 2004 [2006]: 1)
As an example,
Suppose a linguist states it as a condition that in Standard English an independent declarative clause beginning with a preposed negative adjunct must have a tensed auxiliary before the subject:
(1)a. Never before had I seen such a thing.
b. *Never before I had seen such a thing.
[…] The claim being made is not that speakers of Standard English ought to position subjects of independent clauses before the tensed auxiliaries when there is no preposed negative adjunct, as in the (a) exampl[e]; the claim is that they actually do position them thus. (Pullum, 2004 [2006]: 2)
The worst mistakes prescriptivists make, in Pullum’s view, are when they enforce regulative rules that ignore or even fly in the face of constitutive ones. An example is what his bêtes noires, Strunk and White (1972), say about hopefully in The Elements of Style:
‘Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane’ is nonsense. Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you’ll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven’t said it clearly. (Strunk & White, 1972: 42–43)
But in fact you’ve said it perfectly clearly: no one will take you to mean that you’ll leave in a hopeful frame of mind, unless perversely determined to thwart your communication. Who would do that? Well, a lawyer cross-examining you might, but probably not over the word hopefully.
The prescriptivist error can be understood in terms of the polarization that Bruno Latour has shown to characterize modern thought. Latour (1993 [1991]) argues that modernism, antimodernism and postmodernism are all equally grounded in a ‘Constitution’ that took shape in the 17th century, whereby the natural and the human were separated, then gradually made into irreconcilable opposites. Yet the water between them can never be as clear blue as is imagined. In reality, it is muddied by the fact that we can know Nature only through our human eyes and minds, however much we may hide that fact behind instruments and numbers; neither our eyes and minds nor the instruments we create and the numbers we generate stand somehow outside Nature. They are inside what they aim to observe and explain. And yet, people perceive and explain phenomena differently. Convergence is exceptional in science, and never permanent. The modern Constitution demands, however, that we relegate all this to the endnotes, and then delete the endnotes.
Latour designates the ‘human’ pole as Subject/Society, and offers a narrative of modernism as the proliferation of ‘hybrids’ which mediate between it and Nature. By the early 19th century the Constitution had become impervious to criticism. It denies the existence and even the possibility of such hybrids and is instead committed to ‘purifying’ the split. Yet this artificial split has to be mediated, so the Constitution ends up surreptitiously demanding the proliferation of those hybrids it claims to forbid. Such contradictions, far from weakening the Constitution, positioned the moderns as ‘invincible’:
If you criticize them by saying that Nature is a world constructed by human hands, they will show you that it is transcendent, that science is a mere intermediary allowing access to Nature, and that they keep their hands off. If you tell them that we are free and that our destiny is in our own hands, they will tell you that Society is transcendent and its laws infinitely surpass us. (Latour, 1993 [1991]: 37)3
Because we have never practised the absolute separation that is preached, Latour says that we have never been modern. For him the idea of a postmodernism is as absurd as the thought of returning to premodernism. His prescription of a nonmodernism has probably had less impact than his diagnosis of the flaw in our Constitution.
Strunk and White’s mistake, as Pullum sees it, is their failure to understand that language is governed by constitutive rules that are not legislated in the way regulative rules are. Constitutive rules are more fundamental; they have a natural basis. The regulative rules of prescriptivism are the product of Subjects and Society, and must either bow to Nature or appear silly. Note, however, that Pullum is not challenging the Nature vs Subject/Society polarization. He is trying to purify it. The constitutive–regulative distinction perfectly reproduces the Nature vs Subject/Society polarity. From Latour’s perspective, Pullum’s descriptivism is playing the same game as Strunk and White’s prescriptivism, all somewhere within the field of hybrids.
Pullum (2004 [2006]) proposed nine principles underlying prescriptivism, which he aligns with political conservatism:
(1)Nostalgia
(2)Classicism
(3)Authoritarianism
(4)Aestheticism
(5)Coherentism
(6)Logicism
(7)Commonsensism
(8)Functionalism
(9)Asceticism
Véronique Pouillon’s recent re-evaluation of the principles concludes, on the contrary, that ‘the first three can be categorized as conservative, and the other six as reformist’ (Pouillon, 2016: 140). I do not see why the two categories should be mutually exclusive, but all the same, Pouillon exemplifies the current tendency not to see prescriptivism in such a negative light. She represents a more recent direction of travel within linguistics, leaving behind that purifying impulse towards the Nature pole that characterized the field starting from its 19th century aspirations to be a natural science and continuing to Chomsky’s conception of language as a physical organ. The reorientation in the direction of Subject/Society can be seen, for instance, in work over the last decade on the evolution of language, and even within generativism. Sociolinguistics too, which for a long time appeared to treat social categories as quasi-natural, is tending increasingly to adopt the Subject/Society orientation of linguistic anthropologists.
In counterpoint to Pullum’s nine principles, I offer six propositions as to why tempering our anti-prescriptive reflexes would be beneficial to us in resolving various paradoxes into which those reflexes have drawn us.
Proposition 1: Anti-Prescriptivism is based on a False Binarism
This is a theme that runs through a number of the chapters in the present volume. Our favourite flourish when ridiculing grammars and style guides is to show them breaking their own rules. The classic example is Robert Lowth (1710–1787) on preposition stranding – ending a sentence with a preposition – which he notes ‘is an Idiom that our language is strongly inclined to’ (Lowth, 1762: 127–128). But far from breaking his own rule, Lowth is actually being descriptive here (Ayres-Bennett, 2016; Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2011; Yáñez-Bouza, 2015: 214–218): he goes on to say that the idiom ‘prevails in common conversation, and suits very well the familiar style in writing’. But, Lowth adds, ‘the placing of the preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated style’.4
If Lowth is describing how readers or hearers react to the two constructions, is the passage prescriptive or descriptive? Some commentators think the higher value placed on ‘solemn and elevated’ over ‘common and familiar’ means that Lowth is trying to stamp out variation, and that this is the aim of prescriptivism. But they may be imposing their own prejudice onto their interpretation of the passage. In plays and novels of the period, including those aimed at an upper-class audience, the unduly solemn and elevated figure is the butt of ridicule. One needs to suit the style to the occasion.
Consider too the linguist’s term, ‘preposition stranding’, which implies that the preposition belongs before its object. The ‘normal’ structure is the prescribed one; anywhere else and it has been left stranded. Stranding is what Bernard Williams (1985) termed a ‘thick concept’, one that is substantially descriptive while also expressing a specific evaluation. Water is a ‘thin’ descriptive concept, good is a thin evaluative concept, but dogmatic and courageous are thick concepts. Prescriptivists operate with thin evaluative concepts like correct and inelegant, which lead linguists, with our binaristic instincts, to presume that we, as descriptivists, use their exact opposites, namely, thin descriptive concepts. And so we mostly do: fricative, adverb, interrogative and the like are descriptive in the way that water is.5 However, much of our analytical apparatus is ‘thick’ in Williams’ sense. This includes the terms prescriptive and descriptive themselves, of which the Oxford English Dictionary’s two earliest citations in the linguistic context are these, from a Dane and a Czech, as it happens:
1933 O. Jespersen Essent. Eng. Gram. i. 19 Of greater value, however, than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar.
1948 I. Poldauf On Hist. Probl. Eng. Gram. 118 Prescriptivism is the form of authoritarianism characteristic of the English, not Scottish, grammarians of the latter half of the 18th century.
Note the invocation of value and purely by Otto Jespersen (1933), and Ivan Poldauf’s (1948) judgementally loaded equating of prescriptivism with authoritarianism.
It is not easy to get most linguists to accept that the metaphorical connotations of stranding imply a judgement about what is the ‘normal’ position of a preposition. The term preposition itself contains this ‘judgement’ in the pre-, yet this is a simple observation of the fact that English speakers say I did it for them and not I did it them for. The same speakers will usually and quite ‘naturally’ ask Who did you do it for?, unless they have had it beaten into them by prescriptivist teachers that this is wrong precisely because for is a preposition. They are taught that the correct English must be For whom did you do it?, which sounds stilted and artificial to most people, indeed, even to some prescriptivists who nevertheless use this form because it is deemed correct. Linguists have come up with a second thick term, ‘pied-piping’, for sentences such as For whom did you do it? or Ask not for whom the bell tolls; the for has been ‘pied-piped’ from its ‘normal’ position after the verb, where it is placed in deep structure, according to the analysis of John Robert Ross (1967), who coined the term. In Ross’s humorously intended reference, the Pied Piper of Hamelin is the prescriptive grammarian who lures the for out of its natural place. Whether we call for whom the bell tolls pied-piping, or call who the bell tolls for preposition stranding, our largely descriptive term implies an evaluative element, a value judgement about where the for really belongs.
Proposition 2: It is Unclear whether Pure Descriptivism is Possible
The formulation of Hume’s Law, also known as Hume’s Guillotine, was a polarizing moment in modern thought. It concerns how is statements shade into ought ones – how statements that on the surface appear not to make a moral judgement subtly do just that. In his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume (1711–1776) remarks on how an
author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and […] makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. (Hume, 1738–1740: Part I, Section 1)
For an example, we need look no further than this very passage. It is superficially an observation, but with a prescriptive moral stance concerning the use of language, signalled first by ‘of a sudden, I am surpriz’d’. The ‘thick’ word imperceptible connotes deception, slipping in its moral judgement like an ace from the card dealer’s sleeve. Hume’s Law is itself an ‘ought’ statement cast in ‘is’ form. He absolves himself by following up with an overt rationale:
For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it […]. (Hume, 1738–1740: Part I, Section 1)
Providing the reason for the moral judgement is the ‘guillotine’ that would cleanly sever is from ought. A question: Is linguistic prescriptivism inherently a form of moral judgement? Anti-prescriptivists say it is, and I would agree. Whether or not it is expressed in a way that overtly castigates rule breakers in moral terms such as ignorant, lax or sinful, any prescribing of a behavioural norm that identifies some action as better or more correct or logical or authentic or normal than another is implicitly ‘moral’. If you choose to dispute that, I will adduce etymological evidence about the word moral in an attempt to make my prescription trump yours. All these count as values, and values are always potentially moral, while prescriptions are inherently so. But being moral does not make them intrinsically illogical or oppressive.
The reverse is also true: moral judgements, and value judgements, are implicitly prescriptive.6 I am not talking about the intent of whoever makes them; that is ultimately indeterminable. If I ask the person directly, I cannot know whether their response is honest, or even if they fully know their own intent. The best I can do is draw inferences based on my own experiences of making value judgements; yet I know that individuals differ. When I call value judgements implicitly prescriptive, I again mean potentially so, in how they are interpreted by those who hear or read them. As Albert Marckwardt pointed out in an article discussing the controversy over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), ‘An accurate description of the language as it is actually used […] will in itself serve prescriptive purposes’ (Marckwardt, 1963: 337–338).
Although linguists have long asserted descriptivism as a foundational value, what linguists mostly describe are socially shared systems. A few speakers are taken as representative of all. Their observed usage is generally reduced to what is normal, with any eccentricities put into a waste bin of performance errors or idiosyncrasies or are otherwise explained away. Here already is has shaded into ought. Even if just one speaker’s language is being described, how was that speaker chosen? Perhaps she is the last surviving speaker, but in that case, she will inevitably be bilingual, and the linguist will have choices to make about how to handle or ignore the other language which she must use most of the time.
With regard to generative linguistics and its ‘ungrammatical’ sentences that native speakers reject as not part of the language at all, here is another OED citation:
1964 Word 20 289 The charge of prescriptivism is also made against Chomsky.7
Surely that charge will not stick, will it? Chomsky has always been adamant that ‘ungrammatical’ for him is not a value judgement, as it is for prescriptivists who apply it to things speakers regularly say and write but authorities frown upon. Has he not for decades waved the flag for children’s ‘infinite linguistic creativity’ in producing and understanding utterances that they have never heard before? Yet listen to him in 1958, in a debate with Anna Granville Hatcher (1905–1978), a corpus linguist avant la lettre:
| Chomsky: | The trouble with using a corpus is that some authors do not write the English language. Veblen, for example, speaks of ‘performing leisure’, and the verb perform cannot take such an object. |
| Hatcher: | I admit it sounds unusual. But I bet that if you studied the verb perform you would find other expressions not too far from this, pointing the way to this. He has gone farther perhaps along a certain road but I do not believe he has created something new. |
| Chomsky: | No. He has broken a law. The verb perform cannot be used with mass-word objects: one can perform a task, but one cannot perform labor. |
| Hatcher: | How do you know, if you don’t use a corpus and have not studied the verb perform? |
| Chomsky: | How do I know? Because I am a native speaker of the English Language. |
| Hill: | I think at this point I would like to strike a blow for liberty. (Hill, 1962: 28–29)8 |
Archibald Hill (1902–1992), who organized the symposium, acknowledges with his last comment that ‘broken a law’ is as prescriptive as it gets. Chomsky would say it is not, because he meant a ‘natural’ law – and while today he might not apply the term law to the valency of a particular lexical item, he would still claim to be describing his native-speaker intuition here. But what about Veblen’s intuition? Or Hatcher’s, who finds it ‘unusual’ but not unacceptable? And it’s not about nativeness: Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) was American born, the son of immigrants who spoke another Germanic language, and so was Chomsky.9
Proposition 3: Prescriptivism Inheres in Use, not Intent
Chomsky’s intent was never prescriptive, but so what? His ungrammatical sentences describe introspective judgements about what is or is not English or Chinese or whatever. Yet the effect is prescriptive, and we generally take the effect of an utterance to matter more than the claimed intent. If I am charged with making a verbal threat and say in my defence that I was only joking, the judge ain’t gonna dismiss the case out of hand.
The classic mantra of descriptivist linguists is that ‘the native speaker cannot err’. This is fine as an axiomatic methodological position, as long as one is prepared to accept variability. Chomsky’s problem in 1958 was his intolerance of grammaticality judgements that did not match his own,10 and not to see, as Hatcher did, how the sentence he was criticizing was evidence of language change. Chomsky might have objected that Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, 29 years before Chomsky himself was born – but that only shows how languages do not change all in one go. That insight was far from unavailable to Chomsky; it was a long-standing tenet of linguistics that had just had an important new updating by John Fischer (1958). Changes in language always set up a choice with implications for speakers who do or do not take up the change – changes that are ‘political’ in the broad sense, since they become indexed for personal value judgements in a way that directly affects the speaker’s rank in the distribution of social capital and power.
Among these are judgements about ‘authenticity’ – who are the real speakers of the language – with all the knock-on effects that idea has for defining the rightful inhabitants of the place. Your intended descriptive analysis may in time serve as information on how people spoke back in 2020 – back when, from the perspective of 2070, say, Edinburgh was really Scots. Your description may get commodified, your data transferred onto tea towels and T-shirts and picked up in the speech of locals who want to perform (pace Chomsky) their localness. That prescriptive function can go on long after you are dead, and you have no control over it. The meaning of prescriptive and descriptive are in the use of your linguistic work – how it is interpreted and applied – rather than in your intention as an analyst, which no one else can know, only infer, in ways that will vary according to their own experience.
Proposition 4: Anti-Prescriptivism is based on an Impoverished View of Language
It implies that language is detached from people, that it is a code for transmitting information, commands, etc. that can be analysed without considering the interpretative freedom exercised by hearers and readers. Both message and speaker are interpreted, the latter indexically. A ‘hermeneiaphobia’ has always characterized linguistics, a fear and loathing of the notion of interpretation at the individual level (see Joseph, 2010). It is accompanied by a desire to contain interpretation, and maybe even control it. A classic example is Chomsky’s (1964: 7) analysis of how hearers interpret a ‘deviant’ sentence such as Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Their mental grammar assigns a structural description that indicates the manner of its deviation from perfect well-formedness, after which ‘an interpretation can often be imposed by virtue of formal relations to sentences of the generated language’ (Chomsky, 1964: 9). In contrast, with Revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently, the hearer’s mental grammar assigns a structural description indicating that it is perfectly well-formed, and interpretation proceeds automatically. The thick concepts here include deviant obviously, but also well-formed. As for automatically and imposed, which do not have an empirical descriptive basis even on the hearer-response level as well-formed and deviant do, they may qualify as thin evaluative concepts, or at least show that the thick–thin distinction is scalar rather than binary.
Chomsky has revised this in his Minimalist program, where ‘we effectively dispense with the notion of “grammaticality”’ (Ott, 2010: 99), and where, says Chomsky,
‘deviant’ […] is only an informal notion. […E]xpressions that are ‘deviant’ are not only often quite normal but even the best way to express some thought; metaphors, to take a standard example, or such evocative expressions as Veblen’s ‘perform leisure’. […] The only empirical requirement is that SM [Sensorimotor] and C-I [Conceptual-Intentional interface] assign the interpretations that the expression actually has, including many varieties of ‘deviance’. (Chomsky, 2008: 10)11
Fifty years on and deviant is the new normal – but Chomsky still wants to contain it. The scare quotes acknowledge that it is a thick concept, yet that concession acts as a smokescreen, taking away from hearers and readers their freedom to see ‘deviant’ for the thin evaluative concept that it most probably is. He remains no less determined than in 1958 to have the ‘interpretations that the expression actually has’ be assigned rather than individually created. As for what ‘evocative’ may mean to him, I am at a loss even to guess. It appears to be one of those ‘informal’ notions he has just referred to. The Oxford Dictionaries define evocative as ‘Bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind’; does perform leisure evoke memories for Chomsky of his long-ago rejection of it as not English?
Here is a passage from probably the most widely used beginning linguistics textbook ever (Fromkin et al., 2014: 424),12 aimed at showing students why ‘prescriptivism’ is counter-natural, and therefore a ludicrous waste of effort.
| CHILD: | Nobody don’t like me. |
| MOTHER: | No, say ‘Nobody likes me.’ |
| CHILD: | Nobody don’t like me. |
| (dialogue repeated eight times) | |
| MOTHER: | Now, listen carefully, say ‘Nobody likes me.’ |
| CHILD: | Oh, nobody don’t likes me. |
The point is that the child will in his own time say what Mother is telling him to, but right now the child’s mental grammar is at a stage where Mother’s utterance could at best be parroted, not genuinely generated. Mother is being as silly as if she expected the kid to play a violin sonata or solve a calculus problem, and she gets her comeuppance when it turns out that her efforts have made the error even worse. The child is Laurel to Mother’s Hardy.
Such examples are powerful because they are part of our own experiences that we forget until they are pointed out to us, whereupon we can try them out on our own and usually get the same basic result. There are, though, aspects of the example which the textbook passes over, starting with Mother’s linguistic behaviour. It is ‘natural’ for mothers, across species, to ‘groom’ their children – a word that has taken on paedophilic overtones in recent years, but a concept that we cannot do without. Grooming is a genuinely universal practice, and inseparable from all the scaffolding that goes into cognitive and linguistic development. None of the many linguists who have so frequently reproduced this piece of dialogue seems to have cared, by the way, about the traumatizing parenting going on here, quite apart from the prescriptivism: Mother’s response should be ‘Of course you’re liked – I like you’, instead of reinforcing the child’s low self-esteem while showing her love by nitpicking.
Despite these textbook examples of the supposed futility of prescriptivism, anti-prescriptivists underestimate both the average person’s ability to resist control by linguistic means, and the desire for a degree of regimentation of language. Anti-prescriptivism has the admirable social-political motive of wanting to ignore or reject how language functions to establish social relations and social coherence. Anti-prescriptivists recoil from recognizing and tacitly endorsing hierarchies where speakers get judged in terms of intelligence, morality, etc. based on how they speak, when this is not something within the speaker’s power to change – a contentious point, to which I shall return. However they are also prone to convincing themselves that utterances, as long as they are grammatical, generate their own interpretation, which is identical with the utterer’s intention, à la Chomsky (1964). That conviction is the basis for Pullum’s insistence that the rules he formulates are purely descriptive. No ifs, ands or buts. Anyone who might take them as prescriptive is engaging in deviance.
Proposition 5: Anti-Prescriptivism is Bound up with Incuriosity about How Languages are Formed, Changed and Maintained in their Variability
Linguists are surprisingly ready to accept an idealized view that languages somehow ‘naturally’ coalesce, and incurious about the processes and institutions by which they do so. This is a critique that I have been making since Joseph (1981, 1987), and it is heartening to see a growing number of linguists doing excellent research into documentary sources that reveal details about how particular languages were standardized in printing, in legal chanceries and especially in educational institutions (see, for example, Curzan, 2014; Hickey, 2012; Percy & Davidson, 2012; Rutten, 2016; Rutten et al., 2014; Tieken-Boon van Ostade & Percy, 2016). But all of us are well aware that ours is still a minority interest within the field.
The mainstream view is embodied in Pullum’s use of ‘constitutive’ and ‘regulative’ rules. He never brings up the status of the constitutive rules, how they come about, spread, change or are maintained. Most of the time we let ourselves imagine that the needs of ‘communication’ somehow keep variability in check, when the history of every language for which there is documentation suggests that deliberate interventions have gone into making them what they are and are not. Languages, like nations, are ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983), whose coherence has to be invented and then constantly maintained. A key component of this process is forgetting that they were invented, so that they instead appear primordial and natural. Prescription is the ongoing trace of these interventionist processes. We have much to learn from examining the continuity between standard language and language tout court, both diachronically and synchronically.
Language standards and standard languages have remained outside the mainstream of linguists’ interests because of our ongoing faith in a Nature-based science from which value judgements would be excluded. At the same time, standards of language connect to Latour’s polarization: those who value them consider them necessary to the Subject’s rationality and the cohesion of the Social. Cameron (1995), Taylor (1997) and del Valle (2013) are among those who have shown how the discourse of prescriptivism has been linked to the vision of a modern democratic society in which all citizens can participate without linguistic obstacles.
This is quite different from the usual linguist’s take on prescriptivism as a kind of language feudalism, aimed at establishing and maintaining a vertical social hierarchy. This it would indeed be if it were impossible for speakers to learn the language standards that define good and bad usage – in particular, if some physical obstacle prevented this. Such a physical obstacle could be in the brain, where synapses have been so reinforced as to prevent deep re-learning, or in the neuromuscular system – the extended mind – where a lifetime of accumulated ‘muscular knowledge’ resists being undone (see Joseph, 2018). There is no absolute and universal obstacle: some people do change how they speak and learn new languages, even in old age. But many, perhaps most, find it challenging to the point of being practically impossible.
Both of these facts matter – neither trumps the other; hence my call for us to temper, without necessarily abandoning, our rejection of a prescriptivism that plays its role in ensuring a cohesive political discourse while inevitably leaving some by the wayside as collateral damage. Lord Monboddo quipped that Hume died confessing, not his sins, but his Scotticisms. Were those constitutive or regulative rules? Surely both, which is to say: hybrids. Sins and Scotticisms can be conceived of as weaknesses of the flesh, if one prescribes Southern English forms as uniquely standard. Both can carry positive value, if your desired identity is as a Scot, or a Satanist – although the term Scotticisms implies that you are speaking English with Scots indices. If it is Scots to whom you are speaking, the number of Scotticisms will be zero, although you may have Anglicisms to confess.
Also, talking about sins can lead us into another dimension of prescriptivism, that against taboo language – language that is bawdy, an adjective that derives from the noun body. Already in the 18th century we find complaints about ‘compulsive swearing’, which is attributed to ‘habit’, a naturalizing, physicalizing characterization of behaviour that an individual Subject should be able to overcome with an effort of mental will.13 Language standards are in general defined in opposition to ways of speaking too directly connected to the Nature of the body, as opposed to the mind (see Joseph, 2017b, 2018). Mind–body is another polarized dyad that will not prove sustainable. Recent approaches to the embodiment of mind and language give us a useful framework for understanding what it is that language standards aim to suppress.
Pullum (2004 [2006]) notes that prescriptive rules are ‘reminiscent of the vacillating motivations for old-fashioned sex advice to the young. Don’t touch yourself down there, it’s dirty, you’ll go blind, it saps your strength, it’ll ruin you for marriage, it’s unhealthy, it’s immature, it’s immoral, it’s forbidden in the Bible.’ This is an astute observation. Rather than expose the prescriptivist emperor in his nakedness, though, it helps us to understand the power of these hybrid rules through which society exerts its control over nature, control that is neither complete nor non-existent.
Proposition 6: Anti-Prescriptivism is Irreconcilable with Linguists’ Concern for Endangered Languages and Racial Equality
Your average Jo the Linguist pays lip service to vanishing linguistic diversity and may even set up programmes to teach minority languages in places where bilingualism is transitioning to monolingualism in a national or world language. Her concern is not consonant with the laissez-faire approach she takes when it comes to prescriptivism. Descriptivism means standing back, not getting involved; but concern for endangered languages involves value judgements about linguistic and cultural diversity, often combined with moral judgements about the forces thought to be behind the language shift.
Of course, diversity, even if reduced, is never wholly lost. The world language that is being shifted to can take on its own identity value in its local form. Its recognition as a new language may not require, but is certainly much propelled by, the publication of grammars and dictionaries that describe, and by implication prescribe, norms of usage (see Joseph, 2014).
In a conference at the University of York in June 2017, I spoke with a group of Hong Kong natives doing doctorates in various fields, for whom the Umbrella Movement of 2014 was their political awakening, entailing a questioning of who they are in terms of identity, Chinese or Hongkongese. The movement’s name signifies a disruption in the supposed unity of written Chinese. That unity is a cultural topos with particular power on the mainland, where there is less awareness of the use of traditional characters in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan instead of the simplified characters of the mainland. There is also less awareness of the fact that Hong Kongers sometimes deliberately write in ways that embody lexical and syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin.
The standard written Chinese word for umbrella is 伞 săn. This is the simplified character; its traditional equivalent is 傘 saan3, which one would expect to be used in Hong Kong Cantonese, but in fact the Hong Kong word for umbrella is 遮 ze1, which also means ‘cover’.14 When police launched a baton and tear gas charge against anti-government protesters in 2014, the protesters opened their umbrellas in defence. One of the locations of this conflict was 遮打 ze1 daa2 ‘Chater’ Road, named for Sir Catchick Paul Chater, a 19th century British philanthropist of Armenian descent. Following the usual practice, the Chinese name for the road was made up using two characters that sound like the two syllables of Chater’s name, without regard to their meaning. In this case, the literal meaning of 遮打 ze1 daa2 is ‘cover hit/beat’ or, in Hong Kong Cantonese, ‘umbrella for protection against a beating’ – but that is opaque to speakers of Mandarin. 遮打 ze1 daa2 was adopted as the name of what is called in English the Umbrella Movement or Revolution. It signifies the autonomy of Hong Kong culturally, and by extension politically, and it does this in the supposedly unified writing system which is invoked as a cultural justification for absorbing Hong Kong into the People’s Republic of China rather than granting it independence.
Talking with the postgraduate students at York was an occasion to witness people discussing the use of language prescriptivism to strengthen their national identity in pursuit of political freedom. One of them asked, ‘How can we ever achieve independence when we can’t even agree on a name for ourselves? Hongkongers? Hongkongese? Hong Kong something else?’ They considered how they might increase the distance between written Cantonese and standard written Chinese, to capture more fully the syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin that generally get brought into line in writing. The linguists and non-linguists among them all recognized that performing linguistic difference, against the currently prescribed norm but in ways that will become the new prescription, is crucial to their future and their children’s.
In the ‘Black English trial’ (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District) that took place in my native Michigan in 1979, William Labov helped to persuade the court that Black English has a regular structure, rather than just being a cover term for haphazard errors in Standard English. And therefore, its speakers should have the same educational rights the US Supreme Court had granted to second language speakers five years earlier (see Joseph, 2017b; Labov, 1982). This liberation was achieved not by deconstructing prescriptivism, a strategy unlikely to have swayed the Court, but by extending the basic principle of prescriptivism to a nonstandard form of English. Treating its rules neither as thin constitutive ones nor thin regulative ones, but thick hybrid ones – showing that there are right and wrong ways of speaking it – made Black English a language in the legal sense.
Educational systems are bound up with languages. Population movements over centuries have led to a small number of languages carrying particular economic advantages and social and educational power. Linguists’ interventions in the choices made by minority language communities are important, and it is often the case that getting recognition and respect for their languages as being real languages means showing that they have norms of usage that are prescriptive in nature, that are teachable and testable. Our interventions need to be done with sensitivity and thought, not in a polarized way that denies the language community’s right to define its own well-being, its own basic values, and to not have these prescribed to them – even when what they seek from us is support for a prescriptivism that goes against our descriptivist grain.
To conclude: Hume’s Guillotine is based on the belief that descriptions should be value neutral. Yet Hume’s own argument shows how deceptive this is – how descriptions can in fact contain value judgements, and perhaps cannot escape doing so when it is human behavioural norms that are being described. I have tried to show how our linguistic descriptions tend to involve a selection or hierarchization with an evaluative dimension that means we are dealing with thick concepts. We are not, in other words, the polar opposite of prescriptivists. In our thickness, we and they overlap. Anti-prescriptivism is a relic of purifying tendencies that we think we have generally moved beyond. I call upon my fellow linguists to recognize our own covert prescriptivism; to ponder the significance of languages being Saussurean systems of value; and to embrace our hybridity. Hopefully.
Notes
(1)I am very grateful to the editors of this volume and to other colleagues for comments and discussion which helped to clarify issues raised in the following pages, both at the 2017 Prescriptivism Conference in Park City, UT, and at the practice run at the University of Edinburgh organized by my esteemed colleague Geoffrey Pullum. The prescription given by Galen of Pergamon in his treatise On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Passions of the Mind is to find a friend honest enough to speak the truth about the excesses one needs to overcome. I am fortunate to have Geoff as such a friend and mentor.
(2)On Saussure and modernism, see Joseph (2017a), and for an overview of Saussure, see Joseph (2012).
(3)Original (Latour, 1991: 57): ‘Si vous les critiquez en disant que la nature est un monde construit de mains d’homme, ils vous montreront qu’elle est transcendante et qu’ils n’y touchent pas. Si vous leur dites que la société est transcendante et que ses lois nous dépasse infiniment, ils vous diront que nous sommes libres et que notre destin est entre nos seules mains.’ Porter’s translation reverses the clauses in the second sentence.
(4)For a fuller view of Lowth and prescriptivism, see also Pullum (1974) and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2011).
(5)This is not to say that every linguist will agree on the precise definition of fricative, just as water ‘in every cultural context […] is densely encoded with social, spiritual, political and environmental meanings’ (Strang, 2004). Thin descriptive – thick – thin evaluative form a continuum of application in use of terms that helps us to understand what we do with them. They should not be taken as defining characteristics of terms, since this would leave them vulnerable to sceptical or phenomenological questions as to whether any ‘pure’ description is possible: see Proposition 2.
(6)In parallel, we may expect that descriptions are value neutral. Yet Hume himself has shown us how deceptive this is: how descriptions do in fact contain value judgements. Whether there can be value-free description is not a problem he takes up: his concern is simply that it is dishonest to disguise moral judgements as pure description. Actually, where ought is concerned, he ignores the deontic vs epistemic distinction – You ought to be nicer to Mary vs It ought to be nicer tomorrow. The latter contains a value judgement about weather, but no moral judgement, since it is not about behavioural norms.
(7)The sentence is from a book review (Sobelman, 1964) in which Chomsky is being criticized for using made-up sentences as data. The passage continues: ‘It is quite true that the sample English sentences generated by Chomsky sometimes have little resemblance to real English, and we can say, therefore, that Chomsky has erroneously attributed some sentences of Prescribed English to English proper.’
(8)On this passage, see also Boden (2008: 1955) and Sampson and Babarczy (2014: 82–84). Chomsky’s reference is to Veblen (1899).
(9)Veblen was born in Wisconsin to native Norwegian-speaking parents, but English was spoken in the home by his parents with his three elder and 10 younger siblings, and he started school in English at five. Chomsky’s parents were Yiddish speakers living in a mainly Yiddish language community, and young Noam did not have older siblings to help give him a head start in English. Hatcher was born in Baltimore, MD, where Chomsky’s parents married and lived before moving to Philadelphia, PA, and Hill was born in New York City.
(10)Before perform leisure, Veblen (1899) refers to ‘The performance of productive work’ and ‘the performance of labour’, with mass noun objects, but these do not seem to have caught Chomsky’s eye as ‘the performance of leisure’ did; so he may have taken as a syntactic incongruity what was in fact a personal reaction to a particular lexical collocation.
(11)I thank my colleague Rob Truswell for drawing my attention to this passage.
(12)The data come originally from McNeill (1966: 69). No age is given for the child.
(13)These are the terms used by Gibson (1760), on which see further Chapter 5 of Joseph (2006).
(14)The four-tone system of Mandarin is generally represented in Roman transcription with an accent mark over the vowel, and the nine-tone system of Cantonese with the number of the tone in superscript at the end of the word.
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