New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research

Edited by Nuria YáñezBouza, María E. RodríguezGil, Javier PérezGuerra

Publication date:

16 April 2024

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781800416147

This book investigates the connections between evaluative judgements on language and the larger social, cultural, and political issues that shed light on the practice of prescriptivism. The chapters cover three main areas: language, which represents the traditional roots of the study of linguistic norms in authoritative (historical) manuals and judgemental attitudes to language usage; literary and scripted texts, which illustrates the enregisterment of the values of linguistic prescriptivism as a social and cultural phenomenon; and speech communities, which reflects the growth in scope of the field to consider geographical contexts beyond mainstream British and American English to include varieties of English and other languages worldwide. The book also discusses recent theoretical and methodological advances in the study of prescriptivism.

This important volume showcases prescriptivism in diverse linguistic, historical and sociocultural settings. Normative attitudes and practices are integral to people’s linguistic behaviour, and this book puts a powerful spotlight on the need to balance prescriptive and descriptive perspectives – without this marriage of opposites, we cannot hope to understand the complex and dynamic nature of human language.