While prescriptivism is fundamentally misguided, the idea that language can be subject to norms is not. As we mentioned at the beginning of the previous section, language is human behaviour, and human societies tend to consider human behaviours from various normative perspectives. The problem with prescriptivism, then, is not that it is normative, but that it cannot explain its norms in ways that we could argue about and, perhaps, agree upon. If there were a good reason to avoid putting prepositions at the end of a sentence, the English language community might agree to do so and individual language users might be able to train themselves accordingly. It would cause some problems with the use of the relative pronoun that, but given a good enough reason, it might be worth solving those problem.
There is no such reason. However, there can, in principle, be good reasons to use language in certain ways but not in others. As mentioned in the previous section, such reasons are of no concern to the field of linguistics, which is interested in how language is actually used, why it is used in this way, and what this tells us about the language and its users. However, if a language community decides on certain norms with good reason, linguists might be able and willing to provide their expertise in helping language users in putting these norms into effect. In this section, we will look at some areas where this could be the case.
The second subsection in this section contains an example of a slur (a pejorative expression) for Polish people. If you feel that reading such a slur will impact you negatively, y may want to skip the section entirely, or read it in a safe space with people you trust.
Language in its primary modes (speech or signing) is acquired and used in natural communicative settings, and language communities continually adapt it to their communicative needs within the constraints imposed by human cognition. The meaning of words is determined by the way a language community uses them in communication, and the structure of sentences is determined by the way a language community combines words into larger structures. This means that language can never be “wrong” in the way that prescriptivists claim.
Of course, language users can make errors in language production, for example due to being distracted, tired or drunk — they may confuse words, speech sounds or gestures, break off a sentence halfway through or finish it in a way that does not fit with the beginning. But these mistakes are isolated instances and language users recognize them as such without any help from prescriptivists. Language users may also produce ambiguous or overly complex utterances that could cause misunderstandings. For example, they may utter the sentence in (6a), which, like the examples criticized by prescriptivists, ends in a preposition:
The problem here is that there are two prepositions that the expression the professor could belong to, so there are two potential “gaps”, indicated by the dashed low lines indexed with the numbers 1 and 2. When an English speaker hearing or reading the sentence reaches the preposition to, they might think that they have found the gap and that the sentence is supposed to express that Zoe wanted to talk to a professor. When they then hear or read the name Aylin they will be confused as to what function it has in the sentence, and it is only when they reach the preposition about that they realize their mistake and have to reinterpret the utterance to mean that Zoe wants to talk to Aylin about a professor.
In the primary mode of speech, it is unlikely that this will cause confusion, as there are additional indications as to the right interpretation — the shared situation, intonation, etc. However, this is not necessarily true in writing, where the words on a page or a screen are all we have. In addition, sentence structure tends to be more complex in written language than in spoken language, so there will be more occasions for potential ambiguity and confusion.
Thus, language users learning to write complex texts may very well profit from writing advice such as “Avoid ambiguity”, with detailed examples of the different types of ambiguity they should avoid and how to avoid them. Such advice may superficially look like the kind of thing a prescriptivist would say, but there is a crucial difference: the person giving the advice can also give a reason for their “rules”. The person receiving the advice can then weigh their options: if they agree with the reasoning, they can follow the advice, if not, they can ignore it.
We use language to describe the world, but also to evaluate it, and our evaluations can be based in discriminatory ideologies. For example, imagine Zoe telling her grandfather about her linguistic studies, mentioning the name of her professor. Her grandfather might then respond as follows:
The descriptive part of his response expresses an assumption that is not entirely unreasonable — the Polish surname Stefanowicz does exist and hence the professor might be Polish. The name also exists, for example, in Belarus (Стэфановіч) and the countries that used to be Yugoslavia (Stefanović), so he could also be Belarusian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, etc.
One might ask the question, however, why Zoe’s grandfather felt justified in speculating about the national origin of her professor at all — would he have done so if the professor’s name had been less exotic from his perspective? Probably not. By doing so, the grandfather is making an assumption that a foreign-sounding name must make its bearer a foreigner; seems to be stereotyping at best, racism at worst, or something in between.
Crucially, Zoe’s grandfather uses the term Polack, which, to say the least, does not suggest that he has a high opinion of Polish people. We will discuss how such slurs (offensive words that degrade people based on origin, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) work in Section 4.6.
If Zoe were to tell her grandfather that he should not speculate about people’s origin without a good reason and that he certainly should not use ethnic slurs to refer to them, she would be making normative statements. Again, such statements – “Don’t speculate about people’s origin based on their names”, “Don’t call Polish people Polacks” – may look superficially like something a prescriptivist would say, but again, the difference is that Zoe’s “rules” would be based on an explicit norm — the idea that xenophobia and racism are bad. Her grandfather can thus think about whether he finds her case convincing.
