Prescriptivism

Abstract

December 2016 was also when we held the closing symposium of the project, called ‘Life after HUGE?’, where all project members presented papers alongside Rebecca Gowers, author of Plain Words (4th ed. 2014) and Horrible Words (2016), Oliver Kamm, author of Accidence Will Happen: The Non-pedantic Guide to English Usage (2015), and Harry Ritchie, author of English for the Natives (2013). The ideology of prescriptivism is the topic of Morana Lukač’s paper, which analyses the efforts of individuals at maintaining linguistic correctness by writing letters to the editors of two major English language newspapers, The Times and The New York Times. In one form or another these papers thus focus on prescriptivism, ranging from views expressed in the 1980s to today in the form of letters from the general public, to the writing and reception of usage guides, to analysing attitudes to usage through surveys and interviews, and to drawing on the tool that was produced primarily to enable the study of usage guides and usage problems in a systematic way.