Publisher's Synopsis
The colloquium Perspectives on Prescriptivism (20-22 April 2006) was hosted by the University of Catania - Faculty of Foreign Languages - in Ragusa. Until very recently, the received view among linguists was that prescriptivism was a 'bad thing', something only worth considering in order to condemn it as a product of unenlightened thinking. The organisers wished to encourage participants to look at linguistic prescriptivism from a wide range of perspectives. Some of the main questions asked were: To what extent is the concept of prescriptivism to be considered a typical product of the 18