New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research (Multilingual Matters, 176)

This book investigates the connections between evaluative judgements on language and the larger social, cultural, and political issues that shed light on the practice of prescriptivism. The chapters cover three main areas: language, which represents the traditional roots of the study of linguistic norms in authoritative (historical) manuals and judgemental attitudes to language usage; literary and scripted texts, which illustrates the enregisterment of the values of linguistic prescriptivism as a social and cultural phenomenon; and speech communities, which reflects the growth in scope of the field to consider geographical contexts beyond mainstream British and American English to include varieties of English and other languages worldwide. The book also discusses recent theoretical and methodological advances in the study of prescriptivism.

Nuria Yáñez-Bouza is Senior Lecturer at the University of Vigo, Spain and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research interests lie in historical sociolinguistics with a focus on the relationship between norms and usage in the 18th century.

María E. Rodríguez-Gil is Lecturer in the Department of Modern Philology, Translation and Interpreting at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Her research expertise lies in the field of the 18th-century grammatical tradition, the relationship between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and the history of the teaching of English to a native and non-native audience.

Javier Pérez-Guerra is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vigo, Spain. His areas of specialisation are information packaging in the clause, multidimensional approaches to register variation as applied to earlier periods of English, the study of grammatical variation between modern and Present-day English from corpus-based empirical perspectives, and the impact of performance preferences and ease of processing on the design of grammars.