Metaphor as a manifestation of prescriptivism: the case of France and Quebec

This chapter considers prescriptivism in the French language from a comparative perspective, focusing on a particular type of metalinguistic text, namely texts providing “language advice”. It provides a discussion of prescriptivism in general, outlines the development of prescriptivism in two French-speaking areas, France and Quebec, and gives an overview of the types of “language advice” texts produced in both places since the seventeenth century. A case study then analyses the language areas most commonly discussed/critiqued in a corpus of metalinguistic texts from France and Quebec ranging from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, and also examines one means by which prescriptivism can be enacted in such texts, namely the use of metaphor or imagery, specifically those concerning health/sickness.