Bonds and boundaries. On the perceived prescriptivist-descriptivist dichotomy

In recent years, there has been increased interest in research into prescription
and prescriptivism. There is broad consensus today that despite the different nature of description and prescription, the boundary is often unclear in practice. Language descriptions tend to contain operative norms while leaving out much of the myriad of possible deviations, irregularities, and idiosyncrasies. Similarly, while prescriptive grammars and dictionaries normally leave out non-standard variants, their prescribed standard forms typically reflect written or oral texts by some, or many, writers/speakers of a language. An overlap is apparently inevitable, and that may be one of the reasons why traditional academic discourse on the description-prescription relationship sometimes tends to be vague, or even contradictory.
Contemporary research underscores the importance of distinguishing different types of prescription. However, common discourse on the phenomenon is often limited to linguistic features and forms, that at some point may have been recommended by language managers in compliance with tradition and elite culture, while prescription in language indeed concerns much more than e.g. aesthetic judgments, or resistance to language change.
Research has shown how prescription has consequences for language use, variation, and change. Ignoring prescription in modern linguistics would be equally counterproductive as, for example, refusing to acknowledge sociolinguistics as a solid and important subfield in linguistics.
The aim of this paper is partly to provide an account (albeit sketchy) of some recent research directions and studies regarding prescription and prescriptivism, and partly, against that backdrop, to add a few Icelandic examples to the body of cases that previous writers have presented in support of the view that linguistics must acknowledge a description-prescription continuum (rather than a clear-cut ‘dichotomy’), and that there are different types and nuances of prescription.