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.