Methodological approaches to the study of codification, prescription, and prescriptivism

Abstract

ABSTRACT The eighteenth century is widely taken as marking the beginning of a new era in the history of the English language, and one of the reasons for this relates to the process of standardisation. Understood as an ideology or ‘a set of abstract norms to which actual usage may conform to a greater or lesser extent’ (Milroy & Milroy 2012: 19), standardisation is core in the domain of normative linguistics, a field which has been concerned largely with codification and prescription, the last two stages of ‘the implementation of the standard’ as postulated by Milroy & Milroy (2012: 22–23). Codification is closely associated with the eighteenth century, and prescription naturally follows more intensely, though it is argued that it never comes to an end (Tieken 2008a: 10). Prescriptivism is yet a further stage in the pathway towards standardisation which develops ‘in full earnest’ in the nineteenth century (Tieken 2020a: 12), and not only are we entrenched in it but it is ‘resurgent’ as a ‘new prescriptivism’ (Beal 2009: 47). Where the rules that define standard and non-standard come from, what the nature of the prescriptions and proscriptions really is, and who codified the language, are all topics that have been addressed with a new focus since the early 1990s, both theoretically and methodologically. This article is concerned with the latter. It surveys the rich diversity of methodological approaches, old and new, to the study of codification, prescription, and prescriptivism in English. These methods are presented as seven thematic strands, and each strand will address the three main normative sources in this field of study: grammars, pronouncing dictionaries, and usage guides. It will be shown how new approaches have emerged over time, widening the scope of materials examined both in quantity and quality, and how the study of the normative tradition has greatly benefited from recent advances in corpus linguistics and the digital humanities, parallel to developments in other areas of linguistics.