The Role of Prescriptivism in American Linguistics 1820–1970

The phenomenon of absolutist, prescriptive correctness is persistent and pervasive in the linguistic through of educated and intelligent citizens of the United States. This volume is not only and attempt to gain some understanding of the source, nature, and operation of the prescriptive attitude, but also to examine it in the light of what Einar Haugen (1972) has called the ‘ecology of language’, that is, the relationship between language attitudes and other social and cultural behavior.