| 词组 | levels of usage |
| 释义 | levels of usage Back in the 18th century the grammarians recognized only two kinds of English, right and wrong. A usage was right or wrong according to the criteria of the one judging, who sometimes took into account the opinions of his predecessors or contemporaries. Judgments were independent of such considerations as the status of the writer or the variety or purpose of the writing. But a more sophisticated approach was hinted at as early as Lowth 1762; he mentions, just in passing, the solemn and elevated style and the familiar style. What Lowth's casual observations amounted to was the application of stylistic categories from classical English rhetoric to grammar. McKnight 1928 quotes from Sir Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhétorique (1553): "There are three maners of stiles of enditinges, the great or mightie kinde, when we vse greate wordes, or vehement figures. The small kinde, when wee moderate our heate by meaner wordes.... The lowe kinde, when we ... goe plainly to worke and speake altogether in common wordes." Sir Thomas's great, small, and low contrast quaintly with the traditional levels of usage, formal, informal, and substandard, listed by Bailey 1984. Bailey's are the levels of usage that most concerned usage Commentators and English teachers in approximately the first half of the 20th century. The terms could vary—Roberts 1954 used choice, general, vulgate, for instance—but the categories remained essentially the same. Bailey's objection to the system is its tendency, being arranged in a sequence of best, good, bad, to cause people to choose the hardest or longest word as the best word and hence to produce gobbledygook. McKnight notes the same tendency in 16th century writers: the low or plain style with its lack of rhetorical figures was considered vulgar. The usual set of usage categories was attacked by John S. Kenyon in College English (October 1948). Kenyon's thesis was that the usual levels of usage confused cultural levels—standard and nonstandard—with functional varieties of English, such as formal or familiar. Kenyon found the confusion common in his own earlier writings and in that of many of the best-known writers on usage. Later commentators have found Kenyon's analysis somewhat oversimplified, but it seems to have had an effect—the few recent handbooks that we find mentioning levels of usage (McMahan & Day 1984, for instance) tend to stick to functional varieties. A more elaborate attempt to deal with these questions can be found in Martin Joos, The Five Clocks ( 1952). See also formal; informal. |
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