Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism

11 Key excerpts on "Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism"

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  Fixing English

  Prescriptivism and Language History

  • Anne Curzan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  If linguists can provide a working model of prescriptivism and its various strands that makes sense to those inside and outside the academy, it will lay the groundwork for a more productive public conversation about language standards and “correctness” and their relationship to linguistic diversity and change. Prescriptivism’ s umbrella 13 The descriptive–prescriptive binary The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992, 286) provides a typical contrastive explanation of the two terms in its entry descriptivism and pre- scriptivism (note that neither term receives a separate, individual entry): Descriptivism is an approach that proposes the objective and systematic description of language, in which investigators confine themselves to facts as they can be observed: particularly, the approach favoured by mid-20c US linguists known as descriptivists. Prescriptivism is an approach, especially to grammar, that sets out rules for what is regarded as correct in language. Descriptivism focuses on what speakers do with language, based on empirical evidence; prescriptivism lays down rules for what speakers should do with language. This entry defines prescriptivism as a phenomenon more encompass- ing than grammar, but in the phrase “especially to grammar,” the entry hints at the frequent conflation of prescriptivism and prescriptive grammar, a phenom- enon to which I will return. It’ s not that nuances of prescriptivism are entirely absent from available definitions of the term/concept, but they are rarely if ever focal. This allows prescriptivism to function as a broad umbrella for quite different prescriptive phenomena, too often left undistinguished. An earlier entry in the Oxford Companion, on descriptive and prescriptive grammar, serves as an instructive example of the span of the umbrella.

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  The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism

  • Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač, Robin Straaijer, Joan C. Beal, Robin Straaijer, Morana Lukač(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In other words, linguistics … is descriptive, not prescriptive (or normative)” (1968, p. 43). A very similar section can be found 33 years later in Justice (2001). The first chapter, entitled “What is Linguistics,” includes a section on “prescriptivism vs descriptivism”, in which Justice writes: “rather than prescribe to students how they should speak a language, linguistics is mainly concerned with describing how people actually speak” and “what you will soon see, hopefully, is that prescriptivism ignores reality” (2001, p. 5). We even find similar statements in one of the latest introductory textbooks to the history of English. In their chapter on late modern English, Hejná and Walkden (2022) write “[p]‌rescriptivism is in opposition to descriptivism”, and “[l]inguistic research as carried out in academia is descriptive, not prescriptive” (p. 62). 3. The growing body of research on linguistic prescriptivism The growing interest in linguistic prescriptivism has been marked most notably by a recent proliferation of research on the topic, as well as by the organisation of six consecutive international conferences on prescriptivism during these first decades of this century. 5 Several collections that comprehensively contrast case studies focusing on prescriptivism (first only with respect to English, and later also across other languages) arose from this series of international conferences on prescriptivism, and we will briefly discuss them here. The conferences (or colloquia, as the earlier ones were humbly called) started from a desire to explore alternative approaches to the study of English as well as the nature of prescriptivism in its own right

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  Language Prescription

  Values, Ideologies and Identity

  • Don Chapman, Jacob D. Rawlins, Don Chapman, Jacob D. Rawlins(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  versus Descriptive Grammars’)

  In this use, descriptivism focuses on the ways in which linguistic methods might be applied to correctness issues. If judgments about correctness are formed by examining the language in context, using concepts or methods from linguistics, they are often deemed descriptivist . The following quotation illustrates such a use of descriptivist when responding to the contention that the word pornography is not necessarily connected to sex.

  (8c) I’d contend, from a descriptivist standpoint, that, used unmodified, the word ‘pornography’ always refers to sexual or erotic depictions (word, photo, or film). You can add modifiers to the word ‘porn’ to give it a nonsexual sense (e.g. ‘food porn’ or ‘torture porn’), but this usage is rare with the word ‘pornography’. (mr_roboto, 2007)

  In this instance, the term descriptivist is used to label an analysis of a word’s meaning that depends on its collocations and empirical distribution. Interestingly, the writer found his or her way to descriptivist and not empirical to capture this sense. This use of descriptivism to mean ‘using linguistic methods and concepts to analyze prescriptive rules’ appears to be increasingly popular. We need some word for addressing prescriptivist concerns by using linguistic methods, and this seems to be the most convenient. Linguists use it themselves, as seen in ‘descriptive about prescriptivism’ (Brewer, 2018), and ‘a descriptive account of prescriptivism’ (Curzan, 2014: 12) and Describing Prescriptivism (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2020). This may be the clearest instance of convergence on the meaning of descriptivism or descriptivist

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  Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary

  • Phil Benson(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The notion of the dictionary as representation implies a theory of the dictionary based upon theories of semiotics, ideology and discourse that will be outlined in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3. First, however, it has to be acknowledged that dictionary-makers themselves do not typically view lexicography as a process of representation. For most modern lexicographers, lexicography is first and foremost a process of description and the rules and principles of lexicographical practice constrain the lexicographer to ‘accuracy’ and ‘objectivity’. Moreover, twentieth-century descriptivist lexicography defines itself as a response to the prescriptivist lexicography of earlier centuries. In contrast to the prescriptive lexicographer, who relies on intuition and arbitrary diktat, the descriptive lexicographer relies on evidence. In this sense, descriptivism is crucial to the self-image of modern lexicography as an endeavour in harmony with principles of scientific inquiry. We begin, therefore, by examining the nature of the assumptions on which descriptivist lexicography is based and their relationship to evolving theories of language.

  The descriptivist paradigm

  Descriptivism has been described by Moon (1989) as the dominant paradigm for lexicography in the twentieth century. According to the descriptive principle the dictionary should tell the reader what the language is, not what it should be. The descriptive principle is also, in a sense, a moral one since it constrains lexicographers to record the ‘facts of the language’ accurately and without bias and without unjustifiably allowing their own opinions to come to the surface of the dictionary. It places the lexicographer above the interests of factions who might wish to use the dictionary as a site for linguistic or ideological dispute. At the same time it allows the lexicographer to submerge his or her own authority within the authority of the dictionary as an objective record of the language. Descriptivism also prescribes a set of procedures governing good practice, enshrined in manuals of lexicography (e.g., Zgusta, 1971; Landau, 1989), which define modern lexicography as a profession rather than an art.

  Descriptivism does not, however, define the dictionary as a form. Indeed, up until the mid-nineteenth century, dictionaries were, with few exceptions, compiled by individuals with interests and careers beyond the field of lexicography, who routinely inserted their own opinions about the meanings and value of words and the ideas to which they referred. In the late eighteenth century in particular, the authority of the English dictionary lay precisely in the authority of its compiler to tell the user how the language should be used. Descriptivism as a lexicographical principle first emerges in Archbishop Trench’s (1857) address to the Philological Society, now taken to mark the origins of the OED, in which he proposed that the dictionary should be ‘an inventory of the language’ and the lexicographer ‘an historian … not a critic’. These succinct definitions of the dictionary and the lexicographer’s role in its compilation would eventually come to stand for the ideal of descriptive lexicography. Simpson (1990: 1961), coeditor of the second edition of the OED, has described Trench's address as a ‘manifesto for dictionary-makers’ and Gates (1992: 268) has described the OED

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  Language Ideologies and Media Discourse

  Texts, Practices, Politics

  • Sally Johnson, Tommaso M. Milani(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  PART I STANDARDS AND STANDARDIZATION IN NATIONAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS This page intentionally left blank 17 And what should they know of England who only England know? ( Rudyard Kipling ) 2.1 Introduction Metalinguistic discourse in the media is often referred to as prescriptivist insofar as it appears to be a clear example of the kind of discourse whereby someone tries to tell someone else how to speak or write. Here prescriptivism is typically contrasted to descriptivism , that is, a ‘scien-tific’ discourse that aims to capture how people actually speak or write. Undoubtedly ‘telling other people how to speak or write’ is a central metapragmatic practice in the context of language ideological debates, and, as such, is a core topic of language ideology research. However, as has often been pointed out (e.g. Cameron 1995; Johnson 2001), the objective definition and delineation of ‘prescriptivism’, on the one hand, and ‘descriptivism’, on the other, is inherently problematic, not least since each concept is invariably subject to the linguist’s self-perception of her or his own ‘scientific’ task. And although the defini-tional advantage might appear to be on the part of the descriptivist, it is rarely entirely apparent what prescriptivism is supposed to be and do, let alone how it should be accounted for in (socio-)linguistic terms. That said, one thing remains clear: if language ideology research is to be acknowledged as part of the mainstream of linguistic research, it should similarly aspire to the descriptivist ideal of explaining what it is that people actually say and do when they tell other people how to speak or write. In other words, definitional and methodological precision remain fundamental concerns in language ideology research, not least since they apply to notions and practices that overlap with those employed in other fields of linguistics.

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  Correct English

  Reality or Myth?

  • Geoffrey Marnell(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Burdock Books

    (Publisher)

  Even so, if a term or device with no equivalent elsewhere appears in one variant of English, it will either be incorporated into other Englishes if it is deemed to have expressive utility or ignored if it is not. (The Englishes are not separated by impermeable barriers that prevent cross-fertilisation.) Thus an equilibrium of expressive utility is likely to be maintained among the Englishes. This renders any claim that one variant of English is superior to another incurably relativistic. Putting these four planks together yields the descriptivists’ manifesto: if you want to write to communicate—or in a way that maximises communicative potential—it is best to adopt the language conventions of your intended audience: best for readers and writers. By focusing on the audience for language, descriptivism can accommodate language variation and language change. A descriptivist will write differently for an American audience than for a British audience, and a sixty-year-old descriptivist will write differently to how they wrote when they were twenty—if conventions have changed in the intervening years. Using foreign or dead conventions—the logical outcome of consistent prescriptivism—is no less a barrier to communication than making up your own conventions. Prescriptivism, in other words, leads to language that is neither true to purpose nor shows respect for readers. Clearly, then, the better approach is descriptivism. A preference for reader respect over rules is not to dilute the value of rules— so long as they are understood as changeable conventions. Descriptivism does not entail linguistic anarchy. Humans benefit from communication and communication benefits from there being shared conventions. It benefits if there is some convention that enables readers to see where one sentence ends and another begins. It benefits if there is joint understanding of what words mean. It benefits if there is widespread acceptance of the need for a punctuation mark in compound adjectives

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  Language and Human Nature

  • Mark Halpern(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 Descriptivist, Prescriptivist, and Linguistic Activist

  The descriptivist claims summarized, with a Linguistic Activist’s replies

  For a great many years — a handy starting point might be 1906, when H. W. and F. G. Fowler’s The Kings English first appeared — a battle has been going on in the English-speaking world between those interested in guiding language usage and those interested in recording it. The former have come to be called the prescriptivists, the latter the descriptivists. The prescriptivists are usually highly educated and literate, trained in the humanities, and often temperamentally conservative; the descriptivists are usually academic linguists and lexicographers, trained in linguistics or one of the social sciences, and temperamentally “progressive.” Both parties, of course, are small minorities; the great majority of the public is very little interested in thinking about language, whether in order to improve it as an instrument of communication or investigate it as a scientific subject. The conflict between the two parties has nevertheless almost always taken the form of appeals to that largely uncaring public rather than direct confrontation between the combatants: the prescriptivists write letters to the editors of the more serious newspapers and magazines, lamenting the latest evidence of illiteracy, and pointing to failures in our education system; the descriptivists write pieces for the same periodicals pointing out the mistakes in linguistic history committed by the prescriptivists in their letters, and lamenting their general ignorance of linguistic science.

  These forays into print seem to have had little effect except that of relieving the feelings of the writers; I know of no case in which any prescriptivist or descriptivist has been convinced of the error of his ways, nor of any member of the general public who has been persuaded by either party to regard the issues as critical and deserving of much of his attention. Nevertheless, I propose now to join the battle, and hope to achieve a little more than just the relieving of my personal anxieties (when I feel violated by some abuse of language, I just lie back and think of English). I begin by declaring where my sympathies lie: I am by temperament and training a writer and editor; my interest in language is that of a user, and I feel much closer to the prescriptivists than the descriptivists. But I do not identify completely with the prescriptivists; I find that in too many cases their initial reaction, at least, to any neologism makes them seem as blindly opposed to change as the descriptivists are in favor of it, and they do not always take the trouble to think through their opposition to various bêtes noires,

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  Cultures, Ideologies, and the Dictionary

  Studies in Honor of Ladislav Zgusta

  • Braj B. Kachru, Henry Kahane, Braj B. Kachru, Henry Kahane(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Dictionaries for the People or for People?* Francis E. Knowles 0. Descriptivism and Prescriptivism It is interesting to speculate—as AD 2000 approaches—about whether today's lexicographers, particularly perhaps in countries where English is the exclusive, primary or dominant language, 1 feel any great sense of mission in their work. Are they inspired, constantly, continually or indeed ever, by lofty feelings of offering a helping hand to those who suffer from language deficit, of opening up new territory to the culturally disadvantaged or alienated, or of demonstrating to the socio-politically—but not necessarily economically—emancipated that they may feel free, by following their instincts, to be linguistically emancipated as well? Of course, the above question—which is not intended to be merely rhetorical—could easily be stated in the very different terms of the axis of tension which has descriptivism at one pole and prescriptivism-cum-proscriptivism at the other. This would depend materially on whether English still is, so to speak, good news at home and abroad and what methods are chosen for proclaiming this: by offering choice or by imposing rules. For lexicographers of the former persuasion descriptivism implies scrupulous non-intervention, dispassionate non-involvement and a scholarly suspense of value-judgement vis-à-vis their working material so that the banner of their products' authenticity can fly high. Lexicographers must hence deliberately adopt a self-eclipsing profile in order to succeed in the task as they conceive it. In fact, the self-eclipsing process is nearly always less than complete because the introversion mode lexicographers must subject themselves to accidentally permits metalexicography—sometimes referred to as lexicographese— to get in the way of lexicography, thereby provoking inhibitions on the part of the very people for whom dictionaries are intended.

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  Essays on the Moral Concepts

  • R.M. Hare(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Descriptivism i The term 'Descriptivism' was first suggested to me by a phrase of the late Professor Austin's. He refers in two places to what he calls the 'descriptive fallacy' of supposing that some utterance is descriptive when it is not; 1 and, although I agree with him that the word might mislead, it will serve. 'Descriptivism', then, can perhaps be used as a generic name for philosophical theories which fall into this fallacy. I shall, however, be discussing, not descriptivism in general, but the particular variety of it which is at present fashionable in ethics; and I shall not attempt to discuss all forms even of ethical descriptivism, nor, even, all the arguments of those descriptivists whom I shall consider. A sample will be all that there is time for. I cannot claim that my own arguments are original - I am in particularly heavy debt to Mr Urmson and Professor Nowell-Smith; but if old mistakes are resuscitated, it is often impossible to do more than restate, in as clear a way as possible, the old arguments against them. Philosophical mistakes are like dandelions in the garden; however carefully one eradicates them there are sure to be some more next year, and it is difficult to think of novel ways of getting rid of their familiar faces. 'Naturalitas expellas furca, tamen usque recurrent.'' But in fact the best implement is still the old fork invented by Hume. An essential condition for the use of this tool is that there should be a distinction between description and evaluation; and, since the more sophisticated of modern descriptivists sometimes seek to impugn this distinction, I must start by establishing its existence, though I shall not have time to add to what I have said elsewhere about its nature. 2 This problem is Reprinted from Proceedings of the British Academy, XLIX (1963). 1 Philosophical Papers, p. 71; cf. How to do things with words, p. 3. 2 The Language of Morals ( LM), esp. chap. 7; Freedom and Reason (FR), pp. 22-7, 51, 56.

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  Approaches to Language

  Anthropological Issues

  • William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm, William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In other words, leave your language alone, unless you are foolish enough to bring friction and difficulty upon yourself. Or — put plainly — Change your language to that of the standard dialect. As we progress from structuralist to transformationalist grammar, we find that the prescriptivist biases remain about the same. Paul Roberts, the person most responsible for bringing transformational grammar to the high school teacher, emphasizes that the student should be careful not to confuse occurring with correct. He writes: To say that Me and Jim seen it is linguistically as good as Jim and I saw it is not to approve of the former or to say that students should not be taught the latter. Obviously, children being educated must be taught the prestige dialect (1964: 408-409). Prescriptive Grammar: A Reappraisal 585 Ronald Langacker, in his Language and its structure, makes the same point. Standard forms must be prescribed, lest the child be handicapped socially and professionally by speech traits that run counter to those accepted as 'correct' by people he will have to deal with (1968: 55). In the last decade, prescriptivism has been emphasized especially in regard to remodeling Black English speakers into speakers of something else — usually the edu-cated white standard. The fact that most linguists of this century have emphasized the supposed differences between descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar has led people to believe that a fundamental change in orientation between the one and the other was initiated by Bloomfield and Fries. But, as we have seen, this is not the case. The mechanics of description changed, of course, but not the traditional relation between description and pre-scription.

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  Catching Language

  The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing

  • Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench, Nicholas Evans, Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench, Nicholas Evans(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  There are various other respects in which I believe much descriptive work paints a distorted view of language. For example, grammatical descriptions tend to concentrate on regularities and to play down lexical idiosyncracies and lexicalized grammatical constructions. I believe that word classes in particular languages are often Descriptive theories and explanatory theories 227 not as well-motivated as descriptions sometimes suggest, and that word class systems are often highly complex. But again, I view these not as criticisms of basic linguistic theory, but simply as criticisms within basic linguistic theory of applications of the theory. 10 The improvements in basic linguistic theory over the past twenty-five years have not been prompted by specific attempts to improve it, since most linguists have failed to recognize its status as a theoretical framework. Developments have been the side effect of work in typology, and there is every reason to believe that further developments will continue in coming decades, both because of work in typology and quite possibly from new ideas from some other quarter. However, further improvements might develop if more functional, typological, or descriptive linguists recognized the status of basic linguistic theory as a theory, and addressed the question: how could we make the descriptive grammars we are writing even better than they are now? 8. Conclusion I have argued here that the emergence of basic linguistic theory as the dominant theoretical framework for describing languages is something that has happened despite the widespread failure of linguists to recognize its status as a theoretical framework. There are many ways, however, in which the field has suffered from this failure to recognize basic linguistic theory as a theoretical framework and to recognize the need for both descriptive theories and explanatory theories.

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