No. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.
As we'll see, linguistics can certainly be used prescriptively, and often is. However, modern linguists insist that value judgments about language should be recognized as such, and should be examined in the light of the facts. As a result, some critics feel that linguists' attitudes stand in the way of the establishment and maintenance of language standards. You can find a sample of the debate in Geoff Nunberg's classic article Decline of Grammar , or Mark Halpern's more recent riposte A War That Never Ends .
In particular, we can distinguish four types of "correctness":
The roots of linguistics are actually to be found in the needs of the last two, most prescriptive, categories of "correctness" cited above. Linguists have been involved for several millenia in the codification and preservation of languages, and we have learned a few lessons in the process.
The first linguist whose work has come down to us is Panini, an Indian grammarian of the fifth or sixth century B.C. We have some dictionary fragments and grammar lessons from a thousand years earlier, when Sumerian was being preserved as a literary and religious language.
Panini's grammar contained more than 4,000 rules, which were memorized in spoken form only, and were not written down until several hundred years after his death. The purpose of his grammar was to preserve knowledge of the language of the Hindu religious canon. In Panini's time, the ordinary language of the people had changed so much (since the composition of works like the Vedas) that correct recitation and understanding of the sacred works could not be assured without explicit study. For more information about the linguistic situation of Panini's time, consult this link to a paper on Peoples and languages of the pre-Islamic Indus valley.
A few quotes from this paper are instructive:
I am the one who blows like the wind, embracing
all creatures. Beyond the sky, beyond this earth, so much have I become
in my greatness.
In all probability the Indo-Aryans did not speak one uniformly standardized language but mutually intelligible non-standardized dialects. The process of standardization must have been started by the Brahmins earlier but Panini perfected it ... so that this polished (samskrita) language did not change and was considered superior to the ever-changing dialects which were spoken by the people. As the elite looked down upon the uneducated people, it also held their languages in contempt. Thus the Prakrits were a sign of rusticity and illiteracy as the languages of the ordinary people are even nowadays. But the term prakrriti means 'root' or 'basis' according to Katre who suggests that they existed when Sanskrit was standardized. . .
According to George Grierson the Primary Prakrits were living languages in Vedic days. Later they were also fixed by grammarians who wrote their grammars and the living languages of the people were called Secondary Prakrits or 'Sauraseni'. When even these were fossilized by grammarians the Tertiary Prakrits or 'Apabhramasas' were born. By 1000 A.D even the tertiary Prakrits became dated and from this time onward, as we shall see, the modern . . . vernaculars emerged.
In the England of a half-century ago, membership in the upper class
was signaled by subtleties of vocabulary choice that Ross called
"U and non-U," for "upper class" and "non-upper class" (Crystal, p. 39).
Here are a few of the thousands of distinctions in question:
U | Non-U |
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take a bath |
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A literal (and fatal) example of language as gatekeeper is given in Judges 12:
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Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim.
The
Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, "You Gileadites
are
renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh."
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The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and
whenever a
survivor of Ephraim said, "Let me cross over," the men of Gilead asked
him, "Are you an
Ephraimite?" If he replied, "No,"
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they said, "All right, say `Shibboleth.'" If he said, "Sibboleth," because
he could not
pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords
of the Jordan.
Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
As a result of this story, we use the word "shibboleth" to mean an arbitrary linguistic marker that distinguishes one group from another. A 20th-century parallel to the Biblical shibboleth story took place in the Dominican Republic in 1937, when tens of thousands of Haitians were massacred on the basis of whether or not they could roll the /r/ in the Spanish word for "parsley."
The short answer is "because a social or regional dialect is not a medical condition."
There are disciplines allied to linguistics that specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of language- and speech-related disorders. These are generally known as Logopedics and Phoniatrics in Europe and Japan, and go under various less obscure names such as Communicative Disorders in the United States. Linguists also cooperate with medical specialists such neurologists and otolaryngologists to improve the basic understanding, diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions involving speech and language.
In the case of a nodule on the vocal cords, or a brain injury, or a speech defect such as stuttering, no one objects to moving from study and diagnosis to advice and treatment.
These facts don't tell us what values to have. We might decide that it would be a good thing for a particular variety of English -- say the English of Jane Austen, or the English of Theodore White -- to become an unchanging language of formal discourse for the elite, like Latin in Medieval Europe, with the language(s) of daily life despised as "vulgar tongues." We might decide to prefer the existing gradual process of change in formal English, in which one "standard" after another is defended and then conceded. We might even prefer the linguistic anarchy of Elizabethan England, where people spoke, wrote (and spelled) English as they pleased, although they applied strict formal guidelines to their Latin and Greek.
The fact is, it probably doesn't matter much what we want. The English language is likely to go on in the future roughly as it has over the past few hundred years, with a wide range of regional and social varieties, and a more-or-less international formal standard, imposed by consensus and changing gradually over time.
If it turns out that Shakespeare or The New York Times routinely violates the "rule" in question, the pretence is exposed. Linguists love this.
A particularly exuberant example of pedant-puncturing is provided by Henry Churchyard's anti-pedantry page, which systematically documents the use of "singular their" by Jane Austen, one of the greatest prose stylists ever to compose an English sentence. He includes a passage from Steven Pinker on the same construction. Pinker argues that those who fault "singular their" for violating the logic of grammatical agreement have simply misunderstood the grammar of pronouns used with quantifiers as antecedents.
What is "singular their"? It's the use of "they" or "their" in connection with an indefinite third person antecedent.
Churchyard provides an example with a message:
Pinker makes a different argument. He suggests that those who fault "singular their" for violating the rules of grammatical agreement have wrongly analyzed the grammar of the situation, or at least have mixed up two things that need to be kept apart.
Some pronouns refer to determinate (if perhaps imaginary) things: Ann, Sam's nightmares, the milky way. In this case, pronouns naturally reflect the number of their referent. No one who knows English would say "Kim hurt their hand," even if unsure whether Kim is male or female.
Other pronouns don't really refer to anything at all, but instead function like what logicians call "bound variables", place holders in phrases that express relationships among sets of things. For instance, when we say "every girl loves her mother," the pronoun her doesn't refer to any particular girl, but instead helps to establish a certain relationship between girls and mothers, namely that every girl has just one.
The grammar (and logic) of quantifiers like
"every" is actually quite subtle and difficult to get right. The ancient
Greek (and Roman) logicians (and grammarians) were not able to devise a
workable approach, nor were the logicans of Medieval Europe. The first
adequate quantificational logic was only devised about a century ago, by
Gottloeb Frege and Bertrand Russell. They were
working on the foundations of mathematics; the relationship between the
grammar and the logic of quantificational expressions in natural languages
remains a topic of research to this day. So it's not surprising that a
language maven in 1795 (or 1997!) should assume an analysis of quantifiers
in English that is demonstrably wrong.
Not everyone is convinced by these arguments.
Jack Lynch's excellent Grammar and Style Notes say that in such cases
Lynch's "Jane Austen" link connects to Churchyard's page, and he explicitly concedes the historical point. He still believes in the agreement argument -- his position seems to be that agreement failure is a complicated business, but he knows it when he sees it. He may well be wrong, but at this point we are putting one set of native-speaker intuitions (from Pinker and Churchyard) up against another (from Lynch).
After two centuries of struggle, the anti-singular-their forces have won the hearts and minds of an influential fraction of the population. Thanks to Churchyard, Pinker and others, they can't get away with claiming that "singular their" is an example of the decay of the English language, or that it is a violation of the laws of logic.
Prohibition of "singular their" is an innovation, and both the logic and the grammar behind it are shaky at best. However, one can grant these points and still agree with Lynch that "it often makes for bad formal writing today."
For Churchyard, this is a concession to stupidity. For Lynch, it is a recognition of reality, and perhaps also an expression of his own taste.
Speakers and writers may use a completely inappropriate word that happens
to sound like the one they meant,
or combine metaphors into phrases whose literal meanings are ludicrous,
or start with one cliche and end with another, or otherwise use language
badly.
Do linguists defend these malefactors too?
No. Especially not the computers. A mistake is a mistake.
However, we should point out that mistakes of this kind often become part of the language after a while. There are plenty of things in the modern standard English that started out as malapropisms, and if we paid attention to the source of every originally-metaphorical word, almost every phrase could be criticized.
For instance, the the word "muscle" is from Latin musculus "little mouse". If we kept this original meaning in mind, an expression like "put some muscle into law enforcement" would seem pretty silly --- put a small mouse into law enforcement -- Mickey or Minnie? In fact, the expression is fine, because the etymology of the word "muscle" has entirely faded out of our consciousness.
A problem arises when such changes are in progress. These cases are the real stock in trade of the language mavens, who often give useful advice about the status of one struggle or another in this arena .
Here are negative reactions from the English First movement and from Project 21.
Here is a Scientific American editorial on the subject, an essay by linguist Chuck Fillmore and a resolution passed by the Linguistic Society of America.
Finally, a 1972 magazine article by Bill Labov, Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence , that goes over much of the same ground.
For instance, in 1586, Angel Day ridiculed exasperate, egregious and arcane as being "preposterous and confused."
Jonathan Swift, in 1710, objected to mob, operations, ambassadors, communications, preliminaries and banter. Can you figure out why?
See if you can determine what led a commentator in London to attack this passage by Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia, as degraded and vicious in its misuse of the English language:
I only mean to suggest a doubt, whether the bulk and faculties of animals depend on the side of the Atlantic on which their food happens to grow, or which furnishes the elements of which they are compounded? [. . .] I am induced to suspect, there has been more eloquence than sound reasoning displayed in support of this theory; that it is one of those cases where the judgment has been seduced by a glowing pen: and whilst I render every tribute of honor and esteem to the celebrated Zoologist, who has added, and is still adding, so many precious things to the treasures of science, I must doubt whether in this instance he has not cherished error also, by lending her for a moment his vivid imagination and bewitching language.So far the Count de Buffon has carried this new theory of the tendency of nature to belittle her productions on this side of the Atlantic. Its application to the race of whites, transplanted from Europe, remained for the Abbe Raynal.
If you're like most modern readers, it will surprise you that the complaint should have focused on belittle, which was viewed as a barbarous American coinage. Jefferson's use in this passage is the earliest citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In 1785, James Beattie objected vehemently to the use of reform for reformation, approval for approbation, novel for new, existence for life, and capture for take militarily.
In 1837, the Englishman Captain Frederick Marryat ridiculed American usage of fix for prepare, stoop for porch, great for splendid, right away for at once, and strike for attack.
In books like Words and Their Uses (1870) and Everyday English (1880), Richard Grant White objected to "words that are not words, ... a cause of great discomfort to all right thinking, straightforward people." His examples include reliable, telegraph, donate, jeopardize and gubernatorial.
White also objects to words that are really words, but are "constantly
abused":
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"dirt means filth, and primarily
filth of the most offensive kind." |
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"docks must be covered" |
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"a perversion" |
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"insufferable" |
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"vulgar" |
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"coarse" |
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"of very low caste" |
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"laughable and absurd" |
It is not only the prescriptivists of earlier centuries whose concerns
are sometimes obscure. For instance,
within the past generation, the language maven Edwin Newman has diagnosed
a problem with sentences like this:
How about this sentence, in which Newman finds a different but equally
serious fault:
One last Newmanity:
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Elegant
Variations and All That
Usage Experts Change Their Minds,
Too
Fowler, H. W. 1908.
The King's English.
Strunk, William. 1918.
The Elements of Style.
THE CURMUDGEON'S STYLEBOOK:
Contents and Index
alt.usage.english
FAQ
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