Prescriptivism, editing, and morphosyntactic variation in written South African Englishes: A case study of relative who, that and which

Abstract

In variationist research there is little reflection on the multiple agents involved in written textual production, whose distinct linguistic and normative representations influence the linguistic composition of a text. In this study, we ask where the uniformity and prescription-oriented nature of published written language originate – directly from writers, or from those responsible for editorial intervention. Focusing on the alternation between who, that and which in subject restrictive relative clauses with animate antecedents, we analyse patterns of variation in unedited written texts and their edited counterparts, across three subvarieties of South African English. We find that, generally, in the unedited writing of the subvarieties the distribution of relativisers patterns similarly to other varieties of English, reflecting the stability of the English relativisation system. However, in line with previous findings on New Englishes, there are lower-level divergences in the subvarieties investigated – and, in general, higher proportional frequencies of that and which with animate antecedents in restrictive relative clauses in subject position than is generally the case in previous studies that have focused on written language. Where a variety tends towards less prototypical usage, editorial interventions at times mask this by amending usage towards more prototypical usage. However, the patterns of intervention are not always consistent. The linguistic background of the editor in relation to that of the author (i.e. whether they are users of the same subvariety of South African English or not) appears to be one of the factors conditioning editorial intervention.