So language. Very prescribe. Wow.

This is the final version. Available on open access from Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo via the link in this recordThe philosophical dispute about linguistic normativity is one battlefield in a larger war over the nature of language as an object of scientific study. For those influenced by Wittgenstein, language involves following – or failing to follow – public, prescriptive rules; for Chomsky and his followers, language is a property of individual minds and brains, and the grammatical judgements of any mature individual speaker – her competence – cannot be, in any linguistic sense, ‘wrong’. As I argue here, the recent ‘doge meme’ internet fad provides surprising evidence for the prescriptivist view. Normative attitudes towards linguistic practices are a ubiquitous feature of those practices, and there is no principled basis on which to regard them as non-linguistic