Linguistics and English Language

Linguistic Circle

Speaker: John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Is/Ought: Hume's Guillotine, Linguistics, and Standards of Language

Abstract: The empirical focus of this paper is on the relationship between prescriptive language standards and the indices of identity that define language status. Both are value-laden, though with opposite values. The paper considers, inter alia, the complex relation between 'bad English' and World Englishes in post-colonial contexts, including Scotland. If I say that 'prescriptivism' is an unfortunate term because it reinforces the illusion that a pure descriptivism is possible, I am asserting a version of Hume's Law, which concerns how is statements shade into ought ones. His call for them to be strictly separated is known as Hume's Guillotine. But Hume's Law is itself an ought statement cast in is form. If description free of value judgement is impossible, there are no head and body for the guillotine to sever.

In linguistics, descriptivism has long been asserted as a foundational value. Yet linguists mostly describe socially shared systems, taking a few speakers as representative of all and reducing their observed usage to what is 'normal'. Here already is has shaded into ought. When generative linguistics identifies 'ungrammatical’ sentences that speakers reject as not part of the language at all, the prescription-description dichotomy is patently blurred. Modern linguistics emerged in the 19th century in line with the polarization that Latour has identified as defining modern thought, between, in one direction, Nature, and in the other, Subject/Society. Because linguists desired to be taken seriously as scientists, they were pulled in the Nature direction. The descriptive-prescriptive dyad is grounded in this same polarization, with description imagined as being what 'hard' scientists do, and prescription relegated to the 'soft' domain of social values. Yet, as Latour argues, the polarization has never in fact been realized, nor could it be – all of 'modern' thought actually falls into a realm of 'hybrids' lying somewhere in the spectrum between Nature and Subject/Society.

Language standards and standard languages have fallen outside the sphere of interest of linguistics because of its ongoing faith in the value (ironically) of a Nature-based science from which value judgements would be excluded. At the same time, standards of language too connect to Latour's polarization: they are valued as being necessary to the Subject's rationality and the cohesion of the Social, and are defined in opposition to ways of speaking too directly connected to the Nature of the body, as opposed to the mind. Mind-body is another dyad that will not prove sustainable. Recent approaches to embodiment of mind and language give us a useful framework for understanding what it is that language standards aim to oppress, helping us to understand why David Hume is reported to have died confessing, not his sins, but his Scotticisms.

Contact details

Dr Rhona Alcorn

Jun 15 2017 -

Linguistic Circle

15 Jun 2017: Is/Ought: Hume's Guillotine, Linguistics, and Standards of Language

Room 3.11, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD