Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism
Descriptivism and prescriptivism are two contrasting approaches to language. Descriptivism focuses on describing how language is actually used by speakers, without making value judgments. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, seeks to establish and enforce rules for "correct" language usage. While descriptivism aims to reflect the reality of language, prescriptivism aims to guide and regulate it.
5 Key excerpts on "Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism"
eBook - ePubLanguage and Linguistic Diversity in the US
An Introduction
- Susan Tamasi, Lamont Antieau(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This view regards language as both invariant and immutable; it endorses only the structures that are a part of a written standard and mandates these as the only usable forms. To prescriptive grammarians, double negatives or split infinitives are not seen as stylistic choices; rather, they are considered linguistic vagaries that must be extinguished from written and spoken forms of language. Consequently, through the promotion and prescription of these rules, any language use that deviates from this ideal is deemed wrong, and, by extension, those who use these “deviant” forms are often considered aberrant as well. Through a prescriptive lens, language and its speakers are automatically marked as correct or incorrect. DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR AND GRAMMATICALITY JUDGMENTS In contrast to a prescriptive approach, descriptive grammar refers to the underlying structure of a language as it is used naturally by native speakers. Descriptive grammarians do not concern themselves with prescribing stylized ways of using language or declaring speakers “correct” or “incorrect,” but instead are interested in describing the principal structures of natural linguistic systems. Through scientific linguistic investigation (as discussed in Chapter 1), researchers analyze speech for systematic patterns to define the rules—that is, the grammar—of a language. Furthermore, the rules of descriptive grammar take into account all forms of naturally occurring speech, not just the standard forms that prescriptive grammar acknowledges. Descriptive linguists infer rules from the language that people actually use and record the grammar accordingly. By observing the use of English by native speakers, a descriptive linguist would conclude, for example, that nouns are systematically preceded rather than followed by adjectives, such as in the phrase white cow...
eBook - ePubVoices of Man
The Meaning and Function of Language
- Mario Pei(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...problem viii Descriptivism vs. Historicism HISTORICAL, or diachronic linguistics deals with the study of language as it unfolds across time. Descriptive, or synchronic linguistics deals with the study of language as it appears at a given point in time, which is usually the present; but interesting attempts have been made in recent times to reconstruct the synchronic picture of a language at one point or another in the past. 1 Antiquity and the Middle Ages present unscientific attempts at both types of linguistics. In fact, the attempts go back so far that we are left in some doubt as to which came first. Biblical and Greek discussions on the origin of language display undoubted historical features, however erroneous; while any attempt to explain one language in terms of another, such as must have attended the training of Akkadian and Egyptian diplomatic interpreters, must of necessity involve descriptive features, however rudimentary. We have already seen that ancient and medieval attempts at historical linguistics were based on unsound premises. Greater luck seems to have attended descriptivism in those periods, even though the results would not have satisfied a modern linguist. Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit, the numerous grammars of Greek and Latin produced in antiquity, medieval phrase books like the Glosses of Reichenau and Kassel, Aelfric’s eleventh-century Latin-Saxon grammar, were all descriptive in nature, though for the most part fraught with a prescriptive element which modern linguistics would reject. The numerous grammars of various tongues, old and newly discovered, that range from the fifteenth century to our own times, all have descriptive purposes. The historical approach, on the other hand, does not assume truly scientific aspects until the birth of comparativism, in the early nineteenth century. The inception of the comparative method, which is basically historical, also marked its almost absolute predominance in the field of linguistics...
eBook - ePubAuthority in Language
Investigating Standard English
- James Milroy, Lesley Milroy(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 SOME PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF PRESCRIPTIVISM Educational issues and language assessment procedures 8.1 Introduction Throughout this book, we have considered linguistic prescriptivism from two perspectives. First, we have looked at popular and general notions of correctness in language in relation to known facts about linguistic structure and use. Second, practical questions have been discussed as they emerged, particularly questions of interest to educators. Generally, we have argued that objective and disinterested discussion of important practical issues connected with ‘correctness’ (such as the problems of non-standard speakers in the educational system) has been rare, with the result that language teaching and assessment procedures are often less e ffi cient than they might otherwise be. We now consider in a little more detail two practical matters related to language teaching and assessment, areas of activity where an objective and informed approach to the facts of language structure and language use would seem to be especially important. The fi rst is the extensive debate which has been particularly prominent in the British press over the last ten years on the nature of the English language curriculum. The second is the manner in which language tests are used to measure, for various purposes, the linguistic abilities of an individual. This latter discussion is not con fi ned to Britain, nor to educational contexts. 8.2 Press, politicians and the great grammar debate Like most other contemporary states, Britain has a majority of non-standard speakers in the school population. Even within such a relatively small area as the European Community, some governments have responded to the democratisation of education with more enthusiasm than others, as is evident from the widely di ff ering perspectives on education of non-standard dialect speakers described by Cheshire et al. (1989)...
- Heming Yong, Jing Peng(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As a result of the impacts of prescriptive traditions of dictionary-making in Europe and English standardization in Britain, prescriptivism sowed seeds deep in Johnson’s mind that started to sprout and blossom. His “Plan of an English Dictionary” (1747), which was based on the prescriptive principles, can be viewed as the manifesto of Johnson’s prescriptivism, while his dictionary, which laid a solid scholarly foundation for his status as the representative of prescriptive lexicographers, can be reckoned as the test field for the practice of his manifesto. Some critics hold that descriptivism is discernible in his plan and in the making of his dictionary, but it is undeniable that prescriptivism went through the whole dictionary-making and dominated the whole process. Johnson’s dictionary made the prescriptive principles well established in English dictionary compilation and turned them into one of the fundamental paradigms for modern dictionary-making. For the first time, his plan gave a systematic account of how the prescriptive principles could be applied to dictionary-making and enabled English dictionary-making, also for the first time, to proceed under systematic theoretical guidance. That is the most significant theoretical contribution made in the 18th century to British English lexicography. Early in the 16th century, English dictionary-making was affected to varying degrees by pedagogical traditions, and the direct outcome was the primers and textbooks designed for the delivery of English literacy education to school children. Those early predecessors focused on simple common words with phonetic annotations and were aimed to standardize spellings and provide assistance in comprehending texts. However, viewed from the perspective of the language functions of dictionaries, those pedagogical traditions could only meet insignificant consultation needs...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Alex François Alex François Maïa Ponsonnet Maïa Ponsonnet Descriptive Linguistics Descriptive linguistics 184 187 Descriptive Linguistics Descriptive linguistics (henceforth DL) is the scientific endeavor to systematically describe the languages of the world in their diversity, based on the empirical observation of regular patterns in natural speech. Definitions The core principle of DL is that each language constitutes an autonomous system, which must be described in its own terms. Modern descriptive linguists carry out detailed empirical surveys on a language. After collecting language samples from speakers, they analyze the data so as to identify the components of the system and the principles that underlie its organization. Through its commitment to the empirical description of speakers’ actual practices and to the diversity of languages as creations of linguistic communities, DL is closely allied with the social sciences. The research agenda of DL can be contrasted with a number of related yet distinct approaches to language. Anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics study, each in its own way, the interaction between cultural or social factors and language use; by contrast, DL focuses on the structural properties of the languages themselves. Historical linguistics studies the diachronic processes of language change, whereas DL focuses on the synchronic forms taken by a particular language at a given point in its development...
