LANGUAGE CORRECTNESS AS AN APPLIED LINGUISTICS PROBLEM
Correctness and the applied linguist
The triviality of the U/NonU debate obscures the more serious issue of the importance of norms (Bartsch 1988). We may find prescription and moralizing about language use distasteful but what the astonishing commercial success of a guide to ‘correct’ punctuation such as Truss (2003) indicates is that because language changes, users need guidance on how to speak and above all write in their own daily usage. Again, we may baulk at the arrogance of self-appointed moralists, such as those who funded the Society for Pure English in 1913 under the chairmanship of the poet Robert Bridges. Its prospectus proposed:
that a few men of letters, supported by the scientific alliance of the best linguistic authorities, should form a group or free association, and agree upon a modest and practical scheme for informing popular taste on sound principles, for guiding educational authorities, and for introducing into practice certain slight modifications and advantageous changes.
(Smith 1919: 6)
And yet what such initiatives also show is that the language is very much alive: the anxiety about what is correct is evidence of that. It does not really matter whether the moralizers’ advice is taken or not: what does matter is that the language as it changes contains choices. Without such choices, a language is in decline. In his account of the correctness issue, Crystal gives the very sensible advice: ‘If you go around thinking that English usage doesn’t matter at all – that “anything goes” – you’ll quickly get into trouble. Likewise, if you go around thinking that the whole of English is a minefield – that “nothing goes”. The reality is in between’ (Crystal 1984: 117).
The correctness issue presents itself as a language problem to the applied linguist in two ways. First, as an issue which, as we have seen, is constantly drawn to the attention of students in particular and of the public more generally. The applied linguist has a professional responsibility to take a serious interest in all aspects of the issue, including public concern. Second, the applied linguist, in person or in writing, is properly called on for guidance about the choices of usage students, and indeed all of us, must make. Is the response again to be that these decisions are unimportant because the matter seems so often apparently trivial?
The theoretical linguist’s view is that these are not linguistic questions but either unimportant ‘performance’ errors or social ones and in both cases outside their concern. But for the applied linguist they are very much questions that belong within applied linguistics and to them the applied linguist has three responses.
The first is theoretical and has to do with what people’s concern for correctness means, and the answer of the applied linguist is, somewhat unexpectedly, that it represents just how systematic is speakers’ use of a language. It invites the applied linguist to: ‘address the major question: why does language exhibit such a great degree of regularity?’ (Taylor 1990). Such a view necessarily widens the more restricted linguistic concept of language, suggesting ways in which applied linguistics may support and improve the somewhat impoverished abstraction of language which today acts as the focus of linguistic attention.
The second response follows on from the first in that it recognizes that for the applied linguist these pre- and pro-scriptive views are themselves all part of the correctness problem and that to dismiss them as irrelevant or uninformed or indeed trivial is to turn away from the real use of language to the laboratory. The applied linguist may be skeptical about the stern calls for a non-discriminatory language use, on the grounds that language engineering is often ineffectual, but he/she does recognize that the motivation to ameliorate the wrongs of society is genuine and is part of the current politico-linguistic context. Discriminatory and nondiscriminatory choices need to be presented by the applied linguist as options available to language users and attention drawn to the implications of one or other choice.
Third, the applied linguist must be more than objectively critical (and skeptical) in the sense of making informed assessments of the correctness issue. As a teacher and trainer of teachers he/she must also take sides and legislate for students and others as to which language choices are at this point in time more or less standard. In doing so he/she may be wrong, of course, but that is to recognize that even the informed are themselves caught up in time’s linguistic turn.
What is significant about my choice of these three factors is the acceptance by applied linguists of the need to act as a bridge between their language expertise and the skills and knowledge in the specialist area in which resides the language problem they are addressing.
