New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research: 176

The chapters in this book address three main strands in ongoing scholarly work on prescriptivism: language, literary and scripted texts, and speech communities. Collectively, the chapters contextualise the role of prescriptivism in history as well as at the present time. 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.