Quick questions on Attitudes to language change - Edexcel A-Level English Language

Jean Aitchison, in her Reith Lectures (1996), identified three recurring metaphors that prescriptivists use to frame change as decay, and rejected all three.

The most sophisticated move in this topic, and the one that lifts an essay to the top band, is recognising that complaints about "bad English" are usually social and ideological rather than linguistic. When someone condemns a feature as "lazy" or "wrong", they are almost always condemning the speakers associated with it (the young, the working class, a regional or ethnic group). The linguistic judgement is a proxy for a social one. This is why prescriptivist complaint so often targets the speech of lower-prestige groups and rarely the innovations of the powerful.

A columnist argues that text-messaging abbreviations are "destroying" young people's literacy. A strong analytical paragraph would identify the decline framing (a crumbling-castle metaphor in "destroying"), the evaluative and emotive lexis, and the implicit golden-age assumption that pre-texting English was superior. It would then evaluate using Crystal: his research shows abbreviations are a small fraction of texted language and that texting requires phonological and orthographic awareness, so the "destruction" claim is unsupported, and the real target of the complaint is young people rather than the linguistic forms themselves.

A descriptivist blog post argues that "ain't" and double negatives are systematic features of dialects, not errors. A strong paragraph would frame this as the descriptivist position in action: it treats the forms as rule-governed variation (linking to standard and non-standard English), refuses the prescriptivist label of "wrong", and exposes the social judgement behind the prescriptivist view (that the stigma attaches to working-class and regional speakers, not to any genuine breakdown in communication). It would still concede that Standard English remains the expected variety in formal writing.

Name Aitchison's three metaphors for the prescriptivist view of change and what each implies. [3 marks]

Explain the descriptivist attitude to change and one limitation of pure prescriptivism. [3 marks]

Analyse how the writer of an attitude text uses language to present change as decline, and evaluate the position. [16 marks]