Abstract ID: 1066
Part of Session 155: Changing linguistic norms in the audiovisual media (Other abstracts in this session)
Authors: Moschonas, Spiros A.
Submitted by: Moschonas, Spiros A. (University of Athens, Greece)
This paper proposes a performative theory of standardization. Language standards are seen as metalinguistic speech acts that have a metalanguage-to-language “direction of fit” (J. R. Searle), i.e. their perlocutionary effect is ultimately locutionary. Under particular “felicity conditions” (in particular sociolinguistic settings), such metalinguistic acts may raise language awareness within a community and manage to effect or inhibit linguistic change. According to this performative theory, standard languages are subject to restandardization as language standards are subject to redefinition.
The theory is applied to the case of changing standards in contemporary Greek media. A corpus driven approach is employed that allows us to study a particular type of a metalinguistic speech act, which we call a corrective. Correctives typically assume the form: “one should neither say nor write X; instead, one should say or write Y, because Z”. Such triplets, containing a prohibitive (X), a normative (Y) and, optionally, an explicative part (Z), are fairly easy to locate in texts that prescribe on media language usage. Our study draws on a variety of texts about media usage: advice columns in the Greek newspapers, relevant radio and television broadcasts, and style guides for the print and audiovisual media. Correctives tend to form repertories that recur in prescriptive texts of this kind.
Recent corrective repertories are compared to the ones that prevailed immediately after the language reform of 1976, which officialized a norm based on the low variety (demotic). It is shown that the major prescriptive repertories of the earlier period have now assumed the status of descriptive principles and prevail in reference works about Modern Greek. More recent repertories place emphasis on “syntax”, phraseology and idiomaticity, regardless of any grammatical differences between the low and the high variety, which were the focus of earlier prescriptivism. External loans do not seem to be the targets of recent purism. On the other hand, internal purism is still being exercised against the high variety, but the high variety is now being understood as a finite set of cliché phrases. Media prescriptivism, in particular, seems much preoccupied with the niceties of the more esteemed media genres (news and information).
Despite such changes in language standards, the standard language is considered by many to have remained essentially unaltered since the language reform of 1976. Could such changes in language standards account for changes in the standard language? Correctives are, after all, about X/Y variation: X is prohibited because Y has not prevailed. Thus, correctives are equally revealing about actual (X) and prescribed (Y) usage. It is argued that the changes in corrective repertories bear testimony to a process of restandardization, which has affected mainly the “serious” media and their higher monologic register.