Linguistic purism

So ingrained is the habit of making linguistic value judgements that it can be difficult to distinguish descriptive statements from prescriptive ones. To a linguist, a grammatical sentence is one that a native speaker either produces or accepts as possible in his/her language. Purists, on the other hand, see only a prestige or standard variety as acceptable, and condemn transgressions against its norms. Because purists often present prescriptive rules as if they were descriptive ones, statements like ‘X is not English’ can be ambiguous: they appear to mean ‘No English speaker would ever say X’, but often in practice mean ‘Some English speakers do say X, but I don’t think they should do’, which is a different claim entirely. Purists, moreover, often justify their strictures in terms that have little to do with language, as the following examples of prescriptive English rules will demonstrate.

‘“He hasn’t got none” is ungrammatical.’

The word ‘ungrammatical’ here is immediately problematic, as there are clearly many English speakers whose non-standard grammars allow such constructions, which is why we regularly hear examples of constructions like this. The justification for this stricture in standard English, however, is that it employs a double negative, which amounts to a positive, so this really means ‘he does have some’.

Purists’ reasoning here is appealing: in mathematics, taking away a negative is the same as adding a positive, so the two negatives might be seen to cancel each other out in this sentence. And it’s certainly true that this sentence could be construed in that way, though this would normally require a marked stress pattern (He hasn’t got none). But this superficial logic in fact begs a number of questions. Are languages generally like mathematics? Should they be?

Unlike mathematics, grammar is riddled with idiosyncrasies that defy ‘logic’ in any conventional sense; grammatical rules, moreover, are subject to variation and change, whereas mathematical formulae express (or purport to express) logical truths that are universal and timeless (e.g. A = πr² , where A = area of a circle, r = radius and π = approximately 3.14). So it’s odd, to say the least, that language should be evaluated according to mathematical criteria, and intuitively unlikely that a principle like ‘two negatives make a positive’ will have much importance cross-linguistically. In fact, the double negative construction turns out to be very common not just in non-standard English dialects, but also in the standard varieties of many major languages. No one complains about their use in French (je ne sais pas) or Spanish (yo no tengo nada), and double negatives occur regularly in Russian, Italian, Hungarian, Arabic, Breton and Portuguese, to give but a few examples. The double negative stricture is a good example of an arbitrary prescriptive rule being dressed up in logical clothes.

‘You can’t split an infinitive in English.’

The objection here is to placing an adverb between the two parts of an English infinitive, e.g. in to generally agree. Again, such structures are commonly used, as Star Trek fans of a certain age will recall:

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life, and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before! (Emphasis William Shatner’s.)

As Captain James T. Kirk opened each new episode with those immortal words, legions of prescriptive grammarians would rage in their armchairs at the incalculable damage inflicted on the nation’s youth by such grammatical barbarism: ‘boldly to go’ or ‘to go boldly’, fine, but ‘to boldly go’? Never.

The reason for their ire goes back to the eighteenth century, and an analogy drawn by grammarians between Latin and English. English infinitives supported by the preposition to were required to remain fused as single unit, like their one-word Latin counterparts, e.g. amare (to love). The grammar of English was for many years described using the same categories as those applied to Latin, and many of our prescriptive rules (e.g. that one should not end a sentence with a preposition, or that one should say ‘It is I’ rather than ‘It is me’) derive ultimately from Latin. But it’s patently nonsensical to require one language to follow the rules of another, and English is very different from Latin in almost every respect. Unlike Latin, English doesn’t have (among other things) noun gender, case marking of nouns (apart, arguably, from genitive ’s), adjective agreement or a fully marked verb paradigm, so it seems perverse in any case to focus on this particular construction.

Once again, the superficial logic behind a prescriptive rule is based ultimately on a failure to compare like with like: double negatives are condemned on the basis that ‘language should be like mathematics’, while split infinitives are ruled out on the grounds that ‘English should be like Latin’. Linguists prefer to focus on what native speakers of English or other languages actually do say, and to leave prescriptive judgements – and their often spurious justifications – to others.