American Traditions of Language Use: Their Relevance Today

Abstract

FOR many years now the arguments over usage and correctness, linguistics and the school marm, have been put in terms of a basic dichotomy. We have been told that our dealings with language can be either prescriptive, an approach most often associated with Bishop Lowth and the other eighteenthcentury grammarians, or descriptive, a kind of language study that became a way of life following the publication of Leonard Bloomfield's Language in 1933 and was applied to English studies most fully by C. C. Fries. No one claims, however, that these basic views can be confined to historical periods of time-the purist English teacher, it is recognized, is with us today and the objective, descriptive student of language can be found well back in the last century. In a brief history of linguistics, for example, Fries looked back to early linguists such as the American William Dwight Whitney in tracing the growth of the objective or scientific study of language. Nor does any responsible commentator claim that the problem of usage is quite so simple as the two terms suggest. And yet I think it is fair to say that most teachers of English are conditioned to think in these terms.