{"title":"Pinpointing prescriptive impact","authors":"Beth Malory","doi":"10.1075/ijcl.22001.mal","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper presents a single-author case study which demonstrates that the statistical modelling technique change point analysis (CPA) can provide compelling evidence of prescriptive impact at an idiolectal level. It has been hypothesized that Late Modern English review periodicals consistently pushed a prescriptive agenda, and that this impacted language use ( McIntosh, 1998 ; Percy, 2009 ). A lack of empirical research has, however, left these claims unsubstantiated, partly because evaluating prescriptivist endeavours has proven challenging. Using a purpose-built 3-million-token idiolectal corpus spanning 7 decades, this paper reports that it is possible to discern a striking change in usage. Use of CPA enables this change to be located precisely, and correlated to the author’s exposure to a prescriptive review of her work. In demonstrating how effectively CPA can provide a sophisticated correlation indicative of causality, this paper showcases the suitability of this technique to the study of prescriptivism.","PeriodicalId":46843,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Corpus Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Corpus Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22001.mal","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract This paper presents a single-author case study which demonstrates that the statistical modelling technique change point analysis (CPA) can provide compelling evidence of prescriptive impact at an idiolectal level. It has been hypothesized that Late Modern English review periodicals consistently pushed a prescriptive agenda, and that this impacted language use ( McIntosh, 1998 ; Percy, 2009 ). A lack of empirical research has, however, left these claims unsubstantiated, partly because evaluating prescriptivist endeavours has proven challenging. Using a purpose-built 3-million-token idiolectal corpus spanning 7 decades, this paper reports that it is possible to discern a striking change in usage. Use of CPA enables this change to be located precisely, and correlated to the author’s exposure to a prescriptive review of her work. In demonstrating how effectively CPA can provide a sophisticated correlation indicative of causality, this paper showcases the suitability of this technique to the study of prescriptivism.
期刊介绍:
The International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (IJCL) publishes original research covering methodological, applied and theoretical work in any area of corpus linguistics. Through its focus on empirical language research, IJCL provides a forum for the presentation of new findings and innovative approaches in any area of linguistics (e.g. lexicology, grammar, discourse analysis, stylistics, sociolinguistics, morphology, contrastive linguistics), applied linguistics (e.g. language teaching, forensic linguistics), and translation studies. Based on its interest in corpus methodology, IJCL also invites contributions on the interface between corpus and computational linguistics.