Resumen de The construction of authority in 20th-century language columns in France
This study examines a sample of language columns produced by six different authors in France during three key periods of the 20th century to determine how these authors construct the authority necessary to pronounce on language usage and impose particular language ideologies (drawing on Wilson (1983) and Cooper (1989)/Bermel (2007) for the conceptualization of authority). It shows that, contrary to what might be expected for what is often believed to be a genre that is a bastion of lay standard language ideology and prescriptivism, the authors of language columns are not uniformly prescriptive but can be seen to be display approaches that vary from prescriptive to descriptive. There are – also contrary to expectation – no clear tendencies over time, despite changes in the status of French in public consciousness over the period examined. However, all columnists are united in the belief that it is ‘usage’ which is the source of language rules rather than language rules which affect usage, although they differ in their understanding of such usage. Furthermore, the means by which columnists create the authority necessary to make credible language judgments and their view of the role played by usage in the creation of language rules both correlate with their language ideological approach, with clear similarities to be seen between those who take a more prescriptive, and those who take a more descriptive, stance.
