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CHAPTER 2
Language and Authority
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter works from the premise that authority over language should
not be assumed. Students, like all citizens, should consider language and
its public significance thoroughly, examine claims to authority over
language use skeptically, and sometimes challenge assumptions about who
controls both language and knowledge about language, for what reasons,
and to what effects.
In a course intended primarily for students who will become language arts
or English teachers, studying the relationship between language and
authority is particularly important but also problematic. As far as we
know, every U.S. school district expects students to write and speak
something close to standard American English, if not upon entry, then at
least by graduation. It would be irresponsible to lead prospective teachers
to believe otherwise, or to believe that they do not have a responsibility to
teach standard American English as representatives of the systems in
which they teach. Yet many students (and their parents) speak varieties of
American English that diverge strongly from the standard. Labels like
“bad English” when used to criticize student performance can interfere
with learning, particularly given the close link between language and
social identity. Such labels also reinforce assumptions about the intrinsic,
or linguistic, superiority of standard American English—assumptions that
linguistic knowledge itself does not justify.
Assumptions about language and authority are often baseless or at least
poorly conceived. When they become teachers, your students will be
language authorities whether they like it or not, and they will need to
exercise that authority intelligently and responsibly. This chapter should
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help them to ask and answer questions about language and authority
thoughtfully, both for themselves and for their future students. It should
also help them to evaluate various sources of information about language
and language use, to use them more effectively than they otherwise might,
and to teach others to use them wisely, too.
Chapter 2 stands alone, but not in isolation: it intersects significantly with
Chapter 1 (on attitudes about language change), Chapters 11 and 12 (on
language variation and American dialects), and Chapters 13 and 14 (on the
history and future of English). The authors prefer to use the material
presented in this chapter at the beginning of the term in order to frame the
course, so that students distinguish linguistic from social issues while
studying phonology, syntax, semantics, etc. But one could use Chapter 2
at the end of the term in order to place the formal linguistics of earlier
chapters in a distinctly social and political context and to extend linguistic
knowledge into a practical domain.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:
• Explain what people mean when they talk about “Standard English” or
“Standard American English.”
• Differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive linguistic rules.
• Explain the ways in which dictionaries do and do not successfully
describe the English vocabulary, as well as the grounds for accepting
and questioning the authority of dictionaries.
• Explain the value of guides to usage and style, as well as the limits on
their authority.
• Explain the value of corpora in learning about English.
• Use dictionaries, usage and style guides, and corpora effectively in
language research.
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NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
corpus (plural: corpora)
corpus linguistics
descriptive rules
descriptivist
hypercorrection
prescriptive rules
prescriptivist
style
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• Like most of us, students accept assertions of authority about language
all too easily. They use “the dictionary” as though all dictionaries were
the same and equally authoritative; they assume that if someone writes
an editorial about use and abuse of English, he or she must know
something that the rest of us don’t. All of us have probably had at least
one teacher who insisted that nonstandard English was “bad,”
“inferior,” or “illogical” without ever explaining what justifies such
labels (besides institutional authority and language attitudes). We have
trusted those teachers and can find it difficult to question “truths”
about English we’ve heard repeatedly in school.
• For some students, then, especially the most conscientious and
successful, material in this chapter (indeed, material throughout the
book) threatens to turn the world upside down and question the terms
on which they’ve been successful in school. Academic success figures
prominently in their identities, and questioning their assumptions
about their own linguistic superiority invites resistance. After all, how
likely is it that you are right while every one of their previous teachers
was wrong? We highly recommend addressing these concerns
explicitly in class.
• Other students want clear indications of “correct” and “incorrect” in
order to avoid the hard work of judging and explaining the social bases
of language attitudes. Some of these students may be less secure in
their language skills and want answers, not questions.
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IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Description, Prescription, and Standard American English
This chapter’s material invites organized classroom debate. The subject of
debate depends on class size, length of class period, the career ambitions
of students enrolled, and their collective response to the chapter (more or
less resistant). A large class can be divided into small groups to debate the
appropriate use of features like multiple negatives or plural pronouns that
function as singular. Smaller classes can more effectively debate broader
issues, such as how we justify teaching a standard variety of American
English in schools. Large classes full of prospective teachers can debate
individual features in order to consider how they would ultimately teach
about them. Small classes with many prospective teachers can debate the
educational effects of prescription, as though to a local school board or
parent organization. Preparation for a debate can involve critical reference
to dictionaries, usage and style guides, evidence from corpora, and other
writing on English usage and the history of English.
Dictionaries and Usage Guides
Here, too, classroom presentations can bring material in the chapter to
bear on practical issues that confront teachers and parents. Students can
attempt to “sell” various works of language reference to other class
members, who are responsible, as potential buyers, to ask good questions
of the sales representatives. This approach helps students to evaluate
current commercial dictionaries and usage guides (it’s less effective to
have a student attempt to sell the Oxford English Dictionary as though to a
school district), and it works particularly well when the chapter is
scheduled late in the term, after students have learned enough phonology,
morphology, and semantics to assess dictionary treatment of such things.
Public debates about words, such as Sarah Palin’s use of refudiate, can
spark lively discussions in class of what counts as a real word, what counts
as an error, what role creativity plays in language form and usage, and
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when words should be included in dictionaries. To prepare for such a
discussion, you may want to read several entries about refudiate on the
Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/), especially Ben
Zimmer’s post dated June 27, 2010.
There are fun ways to ask students to practice their own lexicographic
skills. For example, have students: (a) copy out the definition of a word
they did not know from a standard dictionary; and (b) make up a new
word and create a convincing definition in the style of their chosen
dictionary. You can then compile a list of real and made-up words for the
class and have them guess which ones are real.
In order to generate critical discussion of usage labels in dictionaries, you
can ask students to make these editorial decisions themselves. Select about
ten taboo or otherwise “usage label-worthy” words from a standard
dictionary and copy out the definitions, omitting any usage labels. In your
definition, include a blank line in any spot in the definition where it would
be possible to insert a usage label. Provide students with the usage labels
that specific dictionary employs (e.g., colloquial, offensive, slang) and ask
them to insert into the definitions any usage labels they think appropriate.
Discuss these as a class, comparing them to the decisions by that
dictionary’s editors.
INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
Homework Progression
Exercises 2.1 and 2.2 are useful at any point in the chapter. In the natural
sequence of things, if they are assigned at the outset, students have results
to discuss in class by the end of this chapter’s week on the syllabus. For
prospective teachers, these two exercises are useful models, as they can be
adapted easily to suit many grade levels. These two exercises are similar
to Exercise 12.2, which also deals with mapping language attitudes. If the
instructor prefers, they can all be folded together into one big experiment
in perceptual dialectology later in the term.
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Copyright © 2012, 2009, 2006, Pearson Education, Inc.
Exercise 2.3 usefully sets up any critical discussion of dictionaries.
Exercise 2.4 is very helpful throughout the course, since once students are
aware of MICASE, COCA, and other corpora, they can consult them in
nearly any other chapter to learn more than the book can illustrate about
morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse markers, etc. Obviously, an
instructor who prefers to use the chapter late in the term will lose this
advantage unless he or she assigns the exercise out of its context in this
chapter. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) recently
became available and can allow students to examine language change over
the past two centuries: http://corpus.byu.edu/coha.
In–Class Activities Based on Homework
Exercise 2.3 can be excellent preparation for certain in-class debates, but
students can also work on it in conjunction with the sections on
dictionaries and usage guides. One hidden value of this assignment: it
introduces students to a variety of lexicographic resources which they
should know about, whether they become graduate students, copyeditors,
attorneys, or teachers.
Students often enjoy comparing their results from Exercises 2.1 and 2.2,
and this activity can generate productive discussion about the nature of
Standard English, language change, and descriptive versus prescriptive
approaches to language.
EXTRA RESOURCES
Depending on the nature of the course in which you use the text, you may
be able to take a day to discuss a dictionary project in detail in order to
demonstrate how bound up in human motives, ambitions, and biases
lexicography can be. In a course filled with syntax trees and hyponymy,
that is, with very concrete linguistic matters, students welcome a day of
narrative. Several books useful to preparing such a class are listed among
the suggested reading, and we would add here Jack Lynch’s The
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Lexicographer’s Dilemma (2009), which also provides background on
some early English usage guides.
In order to frame debate about what a dictionary is supposed to be and
about how language attitudes distort the dictionary’s authority, see Sledd
and Ebbitt, Dictionaries and That Dictionary (1962), which collects
documents from the public controversy over Webster’s Third.
A quick Web search will uncover lots of language commentary, some of it
journalism, some of it blogging, some of it ranting and raving—but it isn’t
difficult to find discussion starters. William Safire’s “On Language”
column in The New York Times Magazine and Barbara Wallraff’s “Word
Court” are useful in this regard as well, and are reliably intelligent if also
insistently prescriptive. Many students may be familiar with groups such
as “I judge you when you use poor grammar” and “Good grammar is hot”
on Facebook. For longer treatments of usage, language change, and the
prescriptivist/descriptivist debate, you can introduce students to Mark
Halpern’s “The End of Linguistics,” which first appeared in The Vocabula
Review, a Web journal edited by Robert Hartwell Fiske (another tried and
true source of prescriptivist complaint about current English usage), and
later in The American Scholar (Winter 2001, pp. 13–26). David Foster
Wallace’s “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over
Usage,” Harper’s (April 2001), pp. 39–58, is a more sophisticated (but
less immediately accessible) treatment of language and authority it is
available online at: http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-
2001-04-0070913.pdf.
The video Do You Speak American? features a section called
“Perspectives on Written and Spoken English,” which includes useful
interviews with Jesse Sheidlower, Principal North American Editor of the
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Oxford English Dictionary, and John Simon, New York Magazine theater
critic and well-known language prescriptivist. The full citation for the
video is included below.
Do You Speak American? Produced and directed by William Cran. 180
min. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2005.