Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

September 19, 2012

Evolution Wrap• Note: survival of the “fittest”

• = that which fits in best in its environment, survives…

• Not necessarily that which is strongest, fastest, etc.

• Ex: cockroaches in a nuclear holocaust.

• Or: mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

• Adaptibility is what matters.

• Some of the distinctive features of language--creativity, displacement, etc.--enable human beings to:

• communicate information about different environments

• develop solutions to new problems

• adapt to new situations

Moving On• So far, we’ve learned:

1. Language is biological

2. Everyone learns a language as they grow up…

• but no one teaches it to them.

• The main points to cover today:

1. All forms of language are very complex.

• And rule-based. (=systematic)

2. Part of learning a language involves learning these rules (the grammar).

• For native speakers, the rules are in their heads!

The Rules?• Since kids are not taught the rules of their native

language explicitly…

• they have to figure out the rules on their own.

• Our goal, as linguists, is to figure out what they’ve figured out.

• (which is not always easy)

• One basic tool we have: grammaticality judgments

• Native speakers of a language have a sense of whether or not particular strings of sounds and words are acceptable expressions in their language.

• plab, forch, *fmort, *ptud

Grammaticality Judgments• Examples at the sentence level:

Grammatical: People in Calgary are friendly.

Ungrammatical: *Calgary in friendly people are.

• How do you feel about these?

1. Winter is a very cold time of year.

2. Sad people sing the often blues.

3. Green eggs like I and ham.

4. Each Nutch in a Nitch knows that some other Nutch would like to move into his Nitch very much.

• One important point: sentences can be grammatical without meaning anything.

The Origins of Grammar• Another important (technical) distinction:

• A grammatical sentence is one that can be generated by the linguistic rules inside of a native speaker’s head.

• An ungrammatical sentence cannot.

• Note: a sentence is not ungrammatical simply because it has been ruled “bad” by decree.

• So. How do you feel about these?

1. The Enterprise’s mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before.

2. Who do you trust?

3. Mick can’t get no satisfaction.

Standards• The rules of “grammar” that we learn in English class first emerged in London in the 17th and 18th centuries.

• Note: Latin used to be the language that all educated people had to learn.

• Latin’s supremacy was being challenged by English…

• So the educated classes decided to incorporate the rules of Latin into “educated” English grammar.

• Examples:

• don’t split infinitives

• don’t end a sentence with a preposition

• no double negatives

Prescriptive vs. Descriptive• Prescriptive grammar =

• Arbitrary rules imposed upon a language by someone (or some group of people) who thinks they ought to be adhered to.

• Descriptive grammar =

• Linguists’ description of the rules of grammar inside of native speakers’ heads.

• Designed to account for native speaker intuitions about grammaticality judgments.

• Descriptive = natural grammar

• Prescriptive = artificial grammar

The Problems with Prescription• There are problems with applying Latin rules to English

grammar.

1. The rules are not organic.

• Note: English is not Latin.

• So: native speakers can get confused about how to apply them.

2. Language is constantly changing…

• So the (arbitrary) standards can also change.

3. Prescriptive rules don’t capture most of the grammatical patterns actually exhibited by language.

4. Most importantly: prescriptive rules are not scientific.

Problem #1: Confusion• A prescriptive rule: don’t end a sentence with a preposition.

• A prescriptive fix:

• Natural: That’s the house we lived in.

• “Fixed”: That’s the house in which we lived.

• How well does this work?

• Paul McCartney: “…and in this ever-changing world in which we live in…”

• Winston Churchill: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put!”

Hypercorrection• Another problem: speakers can sometimes correct forms that aren’t (prescriptively) wrong to begin with.

• This is known as hypercorrection.

• One example: the case of conjoined pronouns.

• Pronouns in English have two forms:

• Subject: I, he, she, we, they

• Object: me, him, her, us, them

• The object pronouns appear in the following frames:

• Bob annoys me. (*Bob annoys I.)

• Karen wants to come with us. (*with we.)

Unforeseen Consequences• Conjoined pronouns:

• Bob and I, Karen and you, etc.

• A prescriptive rule: for conjoined pronouns, use the form that ought to be used when the pronoun stands on its own.

• Examples:

Good: John and I went to the movies.

(Because: I went to the movies.)

• However:

“Bad”: John and me went to the movies.

“Bad”: Me and John went to the movies.

(Because: *Me went to the movies.)

Unforeseen Consequences• In the objective case:

Good: Larry was talking to John and me.

(Because: Larry was talking to me.)

• However, you often hear people say:

“Bad”: Larry was talking to John and I.

• Or Bill Clinton: “Give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back.”

• What’s going on here?

• People have interpreted the rule as:

• “and me” is bad; “and I” is good (regardless of case)

Problem #2: Shifting Standards• “Ain’t” is prescriptively bad.

• “Ain’t ain’t a word, because it ain’t in the dictionary.”

• However, “ain’t” used to be popular among the British upper class (about 100 years ago).

• Another example: runnin’ vs. running, walkin’ vs. walking

• And yet another: double negation (or multiple negation)

• From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (late 14th century):

He nevere yet no villeynye ne sayde.

Translation: He never yet no villany not said.

• From Greg Schiano, professional football coach (last week): “I don’t know that that’s not something that’s not done in the National Football League.”

Double Negatives• Prescriptivists currently frown upon double negatives.

• The argument against them is based on logic:

• The negation of a negation is a positive.

• Q: Why would a native speaker of a language say the exact opposite of what they mean?

• (and why are listeners never be confused by the meaning of a double negative?)

• A: There’s more going on in double negatives than it at first appears.

• Q: How would a prescriptivist fix the following sentence?

• I can’t get no satisfaction.

Problem #3: Missing Patterns• Prescriptivist rules do a poor job of accounting for many of the patterns we find in natural language.

• Here’s one prescriptive rule which misses a consistent pattern:

• “Incorrect”: I feel bad (about the accident).

• “Correct”: I feel badly (about the accident).

• Why? The verb “feel” should be modified by an adverb (“badly”), not an adjective (“bad”).

• But is bad/badly modifying the verb or the subject of the sentence?

Different Standards• Rules for a standard form of a language…

• Normally describe the variety of language used by the group in power.

• Other forms of the language are non-standard.

• And are often identified with social, regional or ethnic groups.

• Linguists have discovered that all forms of language (standard or not) are rule-based and orderly.

• Non-standard forms of the language are not simply mistake-ridden versions of the standard form.

• There is no linguistic reason to consider one variety of language superior to another.

Quick Write:Appalachian English

• Appalachian English is a variety of English traditionally spoken in the Appalachian mountains.

• Developed (and maintained) unique features due to isolation from outside communities.

• One interesting feature:

• a-prefixing…

AAVE• Another variety of English that has (traditionally) been low on the prestige scale is African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).

• a.k.a. Black Vernacular English (BVE), Ebonics

• Predominantly spoken by African-Americans

• but not all African-Americans…

• and some others, as well.

• AAVE has a variety of interesting features...

• some familiar: multiple negation, ain’t as an auxiliary

• others are less familiar…

AAVE Verbs• Verb conjugation: third personal singular verbs lack an [-s] marker.

• Ex: He look, it do, she have

• “Paradigm leveling”

• = making a set of related forms more uniform

• (similar to “he don’t”/”she don’t”)

• Under certain conditions, the verb “to be” can be deleted.

• Ex: you so crazy, she workin’, he lucky

• In the same conditions, “to be” can be contracted in standard English:

• You’re so crazy, she’s working, he’s lucky…

AAVE: Habitual Be• AAVE also has a form of “to be” that standard English does not.

• “habitual” be

• Habitual be expresses something that the subject does on a regular basis.

• Examples:

• He be working at Tim Horton’s.

• She be late. (= She is usually late.)

• She late. (= She’s late (right now).)

• Do you be tired? (=Are you often tired?)

Descriptive Benefits• Language tends to operate in patterns, even if they are:

• non-standard

• pathological

• Descriptive linguistics enables us to understand how those patterns work.

• Even if you want to change the world, you’re better off understanding how it works to begin with.

• History of economics analogy.

To Be Fair• Standards are useful because they provide a single form of the language to teach to non-native speakers.

• They help establish uniformity in the written language.

• They can help clear up confusions.

• for instance: supposably

• They also help to distinguish those who have mastered the arbitrary rules from those who haven’t.

• (for better or worse)

• Otherwise:

• They are not useful for (scientific) linguistic analysis.