“A vulgarity of style which lies deeper than grammatical solecisms”: developing a corpus-assisted approach to identifying prescriptive and normative discourses

Abstract

This paper explores a novel methodological approach to the study of prescriptive language norm dissemination. It reports the result of a study which uses Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (cads) inductively, to identify lexis and discursive patterns indicative of normativity and prescriptivism, in a corpus of literary reviews from Late Modern English. Previous attempts to identify prescriptivism using corpus-based approaches have tended to proceed deductively, using pre-defined indicators of prescriptivism. However, this study uses a speculative research model which proceeds inductively, allowing the datatset to direct the analysis. Thus, whereas research using pre-defined ‘indicators of prescriptivism’ risks overlooking significant patterns of usage, this approach facilitates a synergy of quantitative and qualitative corpus methods which both yields a broad overview of usage patterns and enables in-depth analysis of relevant discourses. Keywords are used to engage quantitatively with a purpose-built corpus, before collocation and concordancing are used iteratively, allowing immersion of the researcher in the dataset. This methodology yields a set of lexical items which identify moments of prescriptivism and/or normativity in the purpose-built corpus. The findings reported demonstrate the promise of using discourse analytic procedures to examine the performance and dissemination of normativity, in a way that could ultimately be replicated in different contexts.