Language Use, Usage Guides and Linguistic Norms

Book excerpt: This volume offers a collection of twelve original papers on language use and attitudes towards language from both a historical and a present-day perspective. The first part of the book focuses on the general theme of language use and on attitudes towards language use in both the past and the present. The second part concentrates on actual language use in personal and public letters from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The third part is mainly concerned with the possible impact of usage guides, and also addresses the problem of language and cultural misunderstanding and the apparent need for usage guides for cultural allusions. Language Use, Usage Guides and Linguistic Norms will be of interest to scholars of language use in both the past and the present, as well as to anyone interested in the interplay between actual language use and prescriptive attitudes towards language.