An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

3 L ANGUAGE CORRECTNESS AS AN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
PROBLEM
Being correct for the user of English means conforming to the rules and conventions
of Standard English. The learner of English as a second or foreign language must first
master the rules; thereafter he/she too must cope with the conventions (or norms)
which are the basis of English instruction at school for the first-language user. Guides
on how to be correct or, more usually, how not to be incorrect, abound, as do
morality-type injunctions on the need to maintain correctness. They range in target
from the prescriptivist alarms of letter writers to newspapers about stereotyped points
of grammar (is ‘none’ singular or plural? is ‘whom’ a dying inflected form?
do we write ‘try to’ or ‘try and’? is it wrong to split an infinitive?) to the pedagogic
approaches of textbook writers, whose interest is very much in the canons of
the grammar and vocabulary of the contemporary standard language. They range
also from the manuals on clear thinking and rhetoric (and their equivalent modern
textbooks on communication studies) to the sociolinguistic interest in linguistic class
markers and feminist observations on the need for an inclusive language which
encourages its users to be non-discriminatory.
Let us look at some examples of concerns in these various areas and then consider
the ways in which these are of interest to the applied linguist.
3.1 Old shibboleths
Complainants about slippage in Standard English sometimes use as evidence the
increasing loss of differentiation between two apparent alternatives, for example
‘disinterested/uninterested’; ‘try to/try and’; and ‘owing to/due to’. In the last
example ‘owing’ is considered to be normally adjectival but functions as a compound
preposition in a sentence such as: ‘Owing to the bad weather we were delayed.’
Traditionally prescriptivists have made the point that in this adverbial use ‘due’
cannot be substituted for ‘owing’. It is therefore acceptable to write: ‘the delay was
due to the bad weather’ but not: ‘due to the bad weather we were delayed’.
And yet, as Peters (1995) remarks, this prepositional use of ‘due to’ is not new and
there is therefore no need to perpetuate the shibboleth against ‘due to’. Here Peters
helpfully reminds us of two fundamental points: first that a standard language
changes over time and no power can stop it: what may have once been a necessary
distinction between ‘owing to’ and ‘due to’ is no longer valid. The second point
paradoxically states that at any one point in time it is necessary for those whose job
it is to prescribe (teachers, textbook writers, syllabus planners, newspaper editors and
so on) to do just that, prescribe what is acceptable and what is not. How they do that
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is to use their own judgement, recognising that there will always be differences of
opinion. It is understandable therefore why those whose job it is to arbitrate in these
matters tend to be conservative. At the same time those with good sense recognise
that constructions which may be considered as wrong by many people now may well
be regarded as quite acceptable in the next generation.
It matters that we are sensitive to the way others feel about language use. For
example, some people feel strongly that prepositions should not end sentences. But
perhaps, as Bishop amusingly reminds us, we should not be too serious about it:
I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, ‘Perdition!
Up from out of in under there.’
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, ‘What should he come
Up from out of in under there?’
(Morris Bishop, ‘The Lost Preposition’)