Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

 

Prescriptivism:

 

 

The general take of a prescriptivist is that there are rules that define how language should be used, and that mistakes result from when those rules are broken. You might hear this idea of prescriptive linguistics described as normative, which means that the rules are based on normal usage, and they determine the way things (spelling, grammar, etc.) ought to be. Some examples of prescriptive rules are:

• Don’t end a sentence with a preposition
• Don’t split infinitives
• Don’t use the passive voice
• Don’t use the pronoun ‘I’ in object position

 

Descriptivism:

The idea behind descriptive linguistics is that a language is defined by what people do with it. In other words, you begin by studying and listening to native speakers. Then, when you notice patterns in the ways that they communicate, you can record those patterns as guesses about the principles of a language. If you rarely (or never) observe someone breaking those patterns, then your guess is more likely to be an accurate representation of the language. Those guesses are called hypotheses, and when they are well-supported by evidence, they can be accepted as correctness conditions for a language. For example, a correctness condition about Standard English is the notion of a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order. It is very difficult (if not impossible) to observe a native English speaker saying something like, “*I an apple ate,” so it is a safe bet that if you hear that, you aren’t hearing Standard English. Of course, it also means that if enough people start using a new construction, then your grammatical model should adapt to accommodate it.

Well known:

Descriptivist's

•  Alexandra D’Arcy 
•  Merriam-Webster

Prescriptivist's

• Shadyah A. N. Cole
• Geoffrey Nunberg

Shadyah A. N. Cole

 

Shadyah A. N. Cole wrote an article on the historical development of prescriptivism , which shows how social and economic conditions influenced scholarly and popular attitudes to the English language; and Geoffrey Pullum’s Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory, in which the author assesses justifications for prescriptivist claims, and shows that “in grammar the 19th century never really went away”.