The Interaction between Prescriptivism and Usage

This brief overview of usage problems, usage guides, grammar writing, and the rise of prescriptivism is general and far from complete. But it sets into relief how far back beliefs about what is and what is not “good English” go. The historical duration of these attitudes underscores the importance of the recent calls for a serious study of prescriptivism. Scholars like Curzan (2014), Cameron (1995), and Milroy and Milroy (1999), as noted above, have done important work in establishing a theoretical grounding for studies in prescriptivism.

Recent empirical work (e.g., Anderwald, 2016; Auer & González-Díaz, 2005) has taken up these scholars’ call to action by investigating the interaction between prescriptive ideologies and changes in actual language use. Auer and González-Díaz (2005) found mixed results in their study of prescriptive grammaticography’s⁸ influence on language change. The authors conducted a case study using corpus methods to study two usage problems: the inflected subjunctive (if I were able to attend versus if I was able to attend) and the double

comparative (more better). They found evidence to suggest that prescriptive writing in the eighteenth century may have had some effect on the use of the inflected subjunctive:

grammarians at the time lamented its loss, and subsequently, its use began to increase. The influence of grammar writing on the double comparative was harder to discern, however. The authors found that the use of the double comparative had at the time already been reduced to near zero by the time the grammar writers composed their works in which they oppose it, so

8Grammaticography is generally understood as the study of grammar writing. Anderwald (2016) suggested that the study of grammaticography can be used to answer questions such as “Which terminology was used, which definitions, and with which examples? Which phenomena were explained in detail, and which only rarely?

What is the common core of…grammar writing?” (p. 9).

their comments on the usage problem “can only be considered a mere reinforcing factor of a process that was set in motion much earlier” (p. 336). As such, the cause of the decline in usage cannot be tied to the grammar writers’ comments on the topic.

In her study of nineteenth century grammaticography, Anderwald (2016) compared prescriptions and proscriptions contained in 258 nineteenth-century grammars with historical corpus data to “[correlate] what happened in language…with what the grammars had to say”

(p. 9). She found that the grammars written during this century took a “generally prescriptive stance” (p. 237), but that the prescriptions and proscriptions found in the grammars often did not precede similar changes in actual language use. In fact, Anderwald found that, in many instances, the reverse was true: as the language continued to change, the grammars followed suit. For example, where the majority of American grammars published at the beginning of the nineteenth century insisted on shrunk as the only acceptable past tense form of the verb shrink, more than 80% of American grammars published at the end of the century either preferred shrank or insisted on shrank as the only correct form, a trend that she observed in historical American English usage (p. 66). Thus, Anderwald provided important evidence of the ways that prescriptive grammars and actual usage interact with one another.

It is important to point out that it is difficult—if not impossible—to state that

prescriptive rules cause some change in the language. Curzan (2014) rightly stated that “[t]he interaction of prescriptivism and usage defies straightforward cause–effect relationships” (p.

87). However, when considered as a whole, research that observes the interaction of prescriptive rules and changes in actual usage, Curzan argued, “make it clear that prescriptivism should not be dismissed as a factor in the development of formal written English” (p. 84, emphasis mine). In other words, we can conclude with some level of

confidence that prescriptivism has at least some effect on language variation and change—

particularly in written English, as Curzan stated above—but the amount of this effect is not able to be discerned through correlational corpus studies alone. However, studies that investigate the relationship between prescriptivism and actual language use can still offer potentially useful probable explanations for some of the influences that cause changes in language to take place.

As the above studies show, research into prescriptivism’s influence on actual language use yields somewhat conflicting results and consensus is far from being reached.

Much additional work remains to be done to fully understand the potential ways in which artifacts of prescriptive ideologies can be observed in everyday language—particularly the English used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The current study contributes to the growing interest in the interaction between prescriptive language ideologies and actual language use by offering comparisons of the ways prescriptive rules are and are not followed in different registers of writing. Unlike some of the studies mentioned earlier, the current study will not take a historical perspective but will instead identify the extent to which prescriptive usage advice can be observed in two different registers of Present Day English:

formal written English (news writing) and informal written English (personal blogs). In the next chapter, I discuss the ways that these two registers differ in terms of formality,

specifically noting that because news writing is authoritative and often carefully edited before publication to ensure it adheres to some standards of language use, it is more formal than personal blog writing—a register that is usually not seen as authoritative or as carefully edited according to formal language guidelines before it is published. Following this analysis

of the situational characteristics of these two registers, I present the research questions guiding this study.