Perspectives on Prescriptivism

The colloquium Perspectives on Prescriptivism (20-22 April 2006) was hosted by the University of Catania – Faculty of Foreign Languages – in Ragusa. Until very recently, the received view among linguists was that prescriptivism was a ‘bad thing’, something only worth considering in order to condemn it as a product of unenlightened thinking. The organisers wished to encourage participants to look at linguistic prescriptivism from a wide range of perspectives. Some of the main questions asked were: To what extent is the concept of prescriptivism to be considered a typical product of the 18th century? What is the attitude of 21st-century scholars and language guardians towards linguistic ‘correctness’? To what extent were books more prescriptive – rather than descriptive – in what has generally been described as ‘the age of correctness’? Some of the answers are to be found in this volume.

The Editors: Joan C. Beal is Professor of English Language and Director of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. She has published extensively on Late Modern English and Dialectology.
Carmela Nocera is Professor of English and History of English at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Catania, Italy. Her research interests and publications are mainly in the field of Translation Studies and literary language in its diachronic and lexicological aspects.
Massimo Sturiale is Researcher of English Language at the University of Catania, Italy. He teaches English and History of the English language. His published and current research focuses on English historical linguistics, Elizabethan translations from Italian, 18th-century English lexicography (mainly pronouncing dictionaries) and Received Pronunciation.