People engage in discussions on which linguistic items are ‘correct’and ‘incorrect’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ on a daily basis.They do so in private conversations, but also publicly by way oftelephone calls to radio stations, letters to newspapers and, sincethe dawn of the participatory internet, on social media platforms,such as blogs, microblogs (i.e. Twitter), forums and Facebook.Conspicuously, however, in linguists’ theoretical models of languagestandardisation, speakers have traditionally been marginalised aspassive followers of the norms established by language authorities.The types of discussions mentioned are viewed as having no impact onactual usage or on what it is that constitutes the standard variety,while standard language norms are, according to such accounts,enforced by language experts, codifiers and ‘model speakers [such asjournalists and newsreaders] and authors’ (Ammon, 2015: 65).

Just after the start of the research project Bridging theUnbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public in2011, we laid our hands on a file called ‘Reactions to L. Trap’. Thefile contains well over 200 documents: letters, picture postcards,notes, newspaper clippings, and various other items, almost all ofthem relating to the reception of a pamphlet called TheLanguage Trap, written by John Honey (1933–2001) andpublished in 1983 by the British National Council for EducationalStandards (NCES). The file was offered for sale by Plurabelle Booksin Cambridge as part of the late John Honey's library, and acquiringit offered a unique opportunity to study the reception of thishighly controversial publication, not only by linguists, but also bythe general public. Both groups responded in large numbers to thepublicity the pamphlet inspired, in the press as well as on theradio.

Having studied attitudes towards usage problems such as the notorioussplit infinitive or the ubiquitous literally inBritish English as part of my doctoral thesis, I was intrigued bythe sheer lack of scientific studies investigating such attitudes.What was even more intriguing was to discover that the same fieldand the same usage problems seem to have received a differenttreatment in the United States of America. While my search forpreviously conducted usage attitude studies in Great Britain haslargely remained fruitless, besides two notable exceptions which Iwill discuss in detail below (see Section 3), a similar search forAmerican usage attitude studies resulted in a different picture.Considerably more such studies seem to have been conducted in the USthan in Great Britain. On top of cultural and linguistic differencesbetween these two nations, it seems as if they also hold differentattitudes towards studying attitudes towards usage problems. Now thefollowing question arises: why do we find such contradictoryscientific traditions in these two countries? In this paper, I willprovide an overview of a selection of American and British usageattitude studies. Taking into account differences between theAmerican and British studies with regard to the number of usageproblems studied, the populations surveyed and the methods applied,I will attempt to capture manifestations of two seemingly divergingattitudes towards the study of usage problems. By doing so, I willprovide a possible explanation for the lack of attention being paidto usage attitudes in Great Britain.

From a descriptive point of view, literally is seenas ‘a case of semantic change in progress’ (Israel, 2002: 424),exemplified through the shift from uses such as This wordliterally means ‘water’ to This book literallyblew my mind. This process of change has been noticedand commented on by language commentators and usage guide writers.In other words, apart from being a case of change in progress,literally is also a usage problem. Usageproblems are ‘features of divided usage’, or ‘instances of usagethat have attracted sociolinguistic controversy’ (Tieken–Boon vanOstade, 2015: 57; cf. Kostadinova, 2018). The case of the wordliterally, then, lends itself to aninvestigation of the relationship between prescriptive approaches tolanguage use typically found in usage guides, and processes oflanguage variation and change, as I will do in this paper. As acrucial aspect to this discussion, I will also address some of theattitudes speakers hold towards the newer uses ofliterally, as attitudes of speakers can help usbetter understand why prescriptivism may or may not influencelanguage variation and change. In what follows, I will first discussthe variant uses of literally found in present-dayEnglish, and then consider findings on three perspectives on thevariation in the use of literally, viz. the ‘usageguide’ perspective, the ‘actual use’ perspective and the ‘speakers’attitudes’ perspective.

Garner's Modern English Usage (hereafter Garner4)was published by Oxford University Press USA in 2016. Appearingwithin a span of two decades, it is the fourth edition of BryanGarner's dictionary of usage, originally published as ADictionary of Modern American Usage (Garner, 1998,hereafter Garner1). It is also the second dictionary of Englishusage to be published during the last three years, following thelatest edition of what is arguably its most direct Britishcounterpart, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern EnglishUsage (Butterfield, 2015, hereafter Fowler4).

At the ‘English Usage (Guides) Symposium’, Cambridge 2014, I wasinvited to account for my revision of Plain Words(Gowers, 2014), the style guide originally written by mygreat-grandfather, Sir Ernest Gowers (1880–1966). And because, bythe time I gave that talk (see Gowers, 2018), I was already writingmy own book on the English language, intended as a sort of adjunctto Plain Words, the arguments aired at thatCambridge gathering were particularly interesting to me. That said,they also left me more daunted than ever by my own project.

The grammarian Lindley Murray (1745–1826), according to Monaghan(1996), was the author of the best selling English grammar book ofall times, called English Grammar and firstpublished in 1795. Not surprisingly, therefore, his work wassubjected to severe criticism by later grammarians as well as byauthors of usage guides, who may have thought that Murray's successmight negatively influence the sales figures of their own books. Asthe publication history of the grammar in Alston (1965) suggests,Murray was also the most popular grammarian of the late18th and perhaps the entire 19th century, andthis is most clearly reflected in the way in which a wide range of19th- and even some 20th-century literaryauthors, from both sides of the Atlantic, mentioned Lindley Murrayin their novels. Examples are Harriet Beecher Stowe (UncleTom's Cabin, 1852), George Eliot(Middlemarch, 1871–2), Charles Dickens, in severalof his novels (Sketches by Boz, 1836;Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–9; The OldCuriosity Shop 1840–1; Dombey &Son, 1846–8); Oscar Wilde (Miner and MinorPoets, 1887) and James Joyce (Ulysses,1918) (Fens–de Zeeuw, 2011: 170–2). Another example is Edgar AllenPoe, who according to Hayes (2000) grew up with Murray's textbooksand used his writings as a kind of linguistic touchstone, especiallyin his reviews. Many more writers could be mentioned, and not onlyliterary ones, for in a recent paper in which Crystal (2018)analysed the presence of linguistic elements in issues ofPunch published during the 19thcentury, he discovered that ‘[w]henever Punchdebates grammar, it refers to Lindley Murray’. Murray, according toCrystal, ‘is the only grammarian to receive any mention throughoutthe period, and his name turns up in 19 articles’ (Crystal, 2018:86). Murray had become synonymous with grammar prescription, andeven in the early 20th century, he was still referred toas ‘the father of English Grammar’ (Johnson, 1904: 365).