Descriptive VS Prescriptive grammar

**flowrish** · 06-06-2009, 02:56 AM

[Prescription vs. Description

When we speak of rules of grammar, we often mean prescriptive rules, i.e. rules that are intended to tell
people how they should speak or write according to some pre-established (arbitrary) standard. Prescriptive
rules are of dubious origin and have no linguistic justification. The linguist is solely interested in
understanding descriptive rules, i.e. rules that govern the way in which people actually do speak. Every spoken
language is governed by rules in this sense. This does not mean that every speaker of English follows exactly
the same rules: English has a number different dialects, which are equally valuable but are nonetheless distinct.
[C. Phillips, University of Maryland

Some Prescriptive Rules of English
Examples
(8) Don’t split infinitives!
a. Do not say: I wanted to carefully explain to her why the decision was made.
b. Say: I wanted to explain to her carefully why the decision was made.
(9) Don’t use double negation!
a. Do not say: I didn't do nothing
b. Say: I didn't do anything
(10) Don’t end a sentence with a preposition!
a. Do not say: A preposition is not a good word to end a sentence with
b. Say: A preposition is not a good word with which to end a sentence.
(11) Don’t use who in place of whom!
a. Do not say: Who did you talk to?
b. Say: Whom did you talk to?

Some of these rules stem from an attempt to make English look like Latin. Thus in Latin an infinitive, being a
single word, could never be split. But of course from this it does not follow that the same should hold of
English, where 'to explain' is made of two words, not one.

In any event, the linguist as a scientist has nothing to say about prescription. We will attempt to describe and
understand the rules that speakers do in fact follow; we are interested in how people speak, not in how they
should speak. Accordingly we distinguish between descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar:
Descriptive grammar has as its goal to describe what the native speakers of a language do (verbally)
when they speak their language (the meaning of the word “grammar” as used in this course).
Prescriptive grammar categorizes certain language uses as acceptable or unacceptable according to a
standard form of the language (the meaning of “grammar” normally intended in English classes).

]