Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar

Descriptive Grammar:

• How people use language in everyday speech
• How our language works
• Part of our "natural" language

Prescriptive Grammar:

• What we are told we should not do with language
• Determined by some notion of authority
• Must be explicitly learned

Rules of English that you may have been taught in grammar school…..

• No split infinitives
• No double negatives; they're "illogical"
• Use "who" and "whom" properly
• Prepositions should not end sentences
• Use "I" instead of "me"
• Use "good" and "well" correctly

Do these rules really apply in everyday speech?

Split infinitives

• To boldly go where no man has gone before.
• To go boldly where no man has gone before.
• She need to carefully assemble that model
• She needs carefully to assemble that model.

Sentence-final prepositions

• What does that widget attach to?
• To what does that widget attach?
• Who did you go to the concert with?
• With who(m) did you go to the concert?

"Who" vs. "Whom"

• Who did Sally punch?
• Whom did Sally punch?
• You gave your car to who?
• You gave your car to whom?

The above examples show that strict adherence to prescribed rules often leads to structures that are not generally preferred by most speakers (at worst, some of them even sound ungrammatical)

Double Negatives

• Are not "illogical"; in many languages they are the normal way to express negation.

  Spanish

  "No vi nada." = English: I didn't see nothing.

  French

  "Il n'a jamais dit cela." = English: He hasn't never said that.

• French and Spanish speakers use multiple negation on a daily basis, and they are not confused!

Where do these rules come from?

Split infinitives

• In Latin, Spanish, French, it is impossible to split an infinitive (they are one word)

  English	Latin	French
  to eat	comere	comer
  to be	esse	être
  to sing	cantare	chancer

• English split-infinitive rules are modelled on the otehr languages, presumably because of prestige

Sentence-final prepositions

• This rule comes from an attempt to copy other languages (which were seen as prestigious)
• In Latin, preposition stranding is descriptively impossible

Don't use double negation

• Comes from logic, or mathematics
• Two negatives = a positive: (-1) x (-2) = 2, not -2
• As seen before, plenty of languages use mltiple negation; speakers of these languages are not confused by the logical ramifications of double negation.

Prescriptive rules are:

• not valid cross-linguistically
• are sometimes based on non-linguistic rules
• can be attempts to model valid language rules from a different language
• seldomly agreed upon by speakers of the same language

Examples of Descriptive rules (in English)

• Subjects come before verbs
• Form a regular past tense by adding "-ed"
• Adjectives come before nouns

Following descriptive rules does not always lead to good comprehension.

A sentence can be descriptively fine, but still be incomprehensible :

• The cat that the dog chased ran away.
• The cat the dog chased ran away.
• The cat that the dog that mouse frightened chased ran away.
• The cat the dog the mouse frightened chased ran away .

"Center-embedded" sentences like the ones above follow the descriptive rules for relative clauses in English. However, as is seen in the last two sentences, they can be extremely dificult to understand!

Some sentences are difficult because they trick us into thinking that they mean one thing, and they turn out to mean something else. These are "garden path" sentences:

• The horse raced past the barn fell.
• While the woman was mending the sock fell off her lap

In the above sentences, we interpret the sentence one way, and are then forced to go back and reinterpret. Overcoming the initial interpretation can often be very hard to do.

The next sentence is impossible to comprehend on the first reading. Without any clues, we are unable to assign different meanings to the four "buffaloes". (Hint: one meaning of "buffalo" is "to annoy")

• Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

  ("Buffalo from Buffalo annoy other buffalo")

Some Interim Conclusions

• Prescriptive grammars do not accurately describe the form and function of natural language
• Prescriptive rules must be learned; they are not part of a native language for a child
• Prescriptive rules are based on ideas about what language should be, even though some of the characteristics of prescriptive grammars are not generally true about many languages of the world.
• People often differ on what should and should not be part of a prescriptive grammar

• Descriptive grammars attempt to describe the natural form and function of a language through scientific methods
• Judgments about descriptive rules are generally uniform across speakers.

Why follow prescriptive rules?

• Symbol of status in society
• Can affect listener's judgment of a speaker
• What we were taught

Status of prescriptive grammar

• Decision to follow rules up to the individual (as opposed to descriptive rules, which are unconscious)
• No scientific basis for superiority of prescriptive rules

What is "sloppy" speech?

• Reduced muscular control (due to alcohol)
• Changes in sounds, not in structure:

  s, ch -> sh

  yes -> yesh

  teach -> teash

  church -> shursh

• These are not characteristics of so-called "sloppy" speech or dialects.