Correctness, Prescriptivism, Purism: The Case of Atticism

This paper is concerned with Atticism, the phenomenon whereby, from approximately the Hadrianic age onwards, the 5th-century Attic dialect was championed as a model of correct Greek through the production of special lexica. The paper discusses whether Atticism should be studied under the umbrella of language correctness and prescriptivism or whether it would more appropriately be subsumed under the more specific category of linguistic purism. Following on from this main question, the paper also considers the criteria that should be applied in assigning Atticism to one of these categories, which embody contiguous sociolinguistic phenomena.