Track Mangoes

One of the more public aspects of linguistic science of the past decades has been its opposition to traditional guidelines of what constitutes 'good grammar', which are exemplified in many style guides, such as Strunk & White, taught by middle-school English teachers everywhere, and enforced by whatever idiots devised the grammar-checker in Microsoft Word. What is at stake in this debate is both the relevant sense of the word 'grammar' and the appropriate norms of language, both written and spoken. Though a more obvious analysis would be an appeal to the 'objectivity' of modern science and the egotism and oppressive natures of professional writers and teachers, I think there is a deep connection between this debate and the paradigm shift in linguistic study brought about by Ferdinand de Saussure, often called the father of modern linguistics—though he is rarely cited anymore in this discipline.

De Saussure introduced the terms 'synchronic' and 'diachronic' analysis to describe how his analysis differed from his predecessors'. Diachronic analysis refers to what we call historical linguistics; it is the study of how language has changed over time, the historical relationships between languages—in short, the mainstay of 19th-century linguistics. 'Synchronic' analysis, in contrast, is the study of a language at a single, fixed point in time as a complete system of communication; this view of language is the basis of the structuralist project initiated by Saussure, carried on by the Russians and re-imagined by French philosophers. Linguists working in the scientific tradition haven't talked about structuralism since Chomsky gave them a new paradigm and structuralism became associated with the kind of philosophy that scientists are supposed to hate, but most linguistic work continues to be of a synchronic character.

One distinctive feature of the kinds of prescriptions made about language is that, by and large, they have long histories, stretching back to the 19th century or before. There has been no paradigm shift in this area; even new prescriptions are very similar in kind to the old. Some (source would be needed if I were rigorous) have likened these prescriptions—at least, those with no apparent basis, as myths or superstitions—and they do have a similar memetic quality. The pressures that shape them are entirely different from those that shape scientific theories. This relation to history strikes me as similar to diachronic linguistics, but the former is intensely conservative, while most scientific or semi-scientific forms of diachronic analysis are perfectly willing to accept linguistic change as normal and often desirable, as is obvious from any logical study of history. This contradiction—the emphasis on history and myth combined with the denial of the legitimacy of linguistic change—effect the distinctive character of most linguistic prescription. The prescriptivist is content with neither diachronic nor synchronic analysis, but rather fixes some point in history as an ideal (a point which inevitably varies depending on the prescription), and adopts it as a standard to judge current synchronic usage. Of course, many prescriptions have no real point in history at which usage would bear out their thesis, but most are perceived and transmitted as if they did. In any case, I think their real use in society, or one of them, is one of oppression, a syntactic or orthographic shibboleth that often masks racism or classism as education.