NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Back to results
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
ERIC Number: EJ1319150
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0143-4632
EISSN: N/A
Of Greengrocers, Sports Commentators, Estate Agents and Television Presenters: Who's in a Usage Guide and Why
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, v42 n9 p783-791 2021
Weiner (1988. "On Editing a Usage Guide." In "Words for Robert Burchfield's Sixty-Fifth Birthday," edited by E. G. Stanley, and T. F. Hoad, 171-183. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 173) describes usage guides as being 'as broad as the English language, covering spelling, punctuation, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis, and involving sociolinguistic considerations'. This paper focusses on these 'sociolinguistic considerations', to try and answer the question of why people like greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters are stigmatised for certain perceived linguistic errors. The greengrocer's apostrophe is well known (Beal, Joan C. 2010. "The Grocer's Apostrophe: Popular Prescriptivism in the Twenty-First Century." "English Today" 26 (2): 57-64), but the other three categories, the sports commentators' adverb (the flat adverb), the estate agent's pronoun ("yourselves" for "you") and the television presenter's demonstrative pronoun ("these"/"those ones"), I first encountered in Caroline Taggart's "Her Ladyship's Guide to the Queen's English" (2010), one of the three most recent and most prescriptive publications in the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems. Discussing Taggart's usage guide as a case study, I will go into the question of why certain groups of speakers are made into the object of prescriptivism and will argue that the British class system plays an important role in this. As a case study, this article highlights the need for more linguists to view usage guides as a genre that needs to be treated critically rather than be ignored, as is generally the case at present.
Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A