For some time now, it has been customary to label those who write about grammar and usage as either prescriptivists or descriptivists. The former think there are “right” and “wrong” ways to say or write, while the latter claim that we can only record how people actually use language, since any widespread successful usage is, ipso facto, “right.”
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For some time now, it has been customary to label those who write about grammar and usage as either prescriptivists or descriptivists. The former think there are “right” and “wrong” ways to say or write, while the latter claim that we can only record how people actually use language, since any widespread successful usage is, ipso facto, “right.”
Collini sees that his distinction breaks down after even a cursory glance, and goes on to make that point—but not sharply enough.
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A belief that “there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to say or write” may be a necessary condition for being a prescriptivist, but it is nowhere near sufficient. Believing that some sequences of words are grammatical and others are not, as I do and I hope you do too, doesn’t make either me or you a prescriptivist. The whole point of a descriptive grammar lies in the fact that some constructions really are grammatical and others are not, and it is not an a priori matter to discern the difference.
For descriptivists who fail to satisfy Collini’s alleged condition for being a prescriptivist, their occupation is gone: If there is no distinction between what is grammatically correct English and grammatically incorrect English, linguists don’t need to do any work at all on describing English grammar.
Prescriptivists are actually characterized, at least stereotypically, by three properties that Collini does not mention. First, a kind of missionary calling: Prescriptivists yearn to improve others, and the language. They seek to stamp out undesirable words and constructions, by any means necessary—ridicule, moral pressure, harsh educational measures, or whatever.
Second, prescriptivists tend to hold false (usually conservative) beliefs about what the rules of the language are: They look backward with blurred vision to an earlier age when language use was supposedly better, but they usually characterize the past of the language just as inaccurately as they misrepresent its present state.
Third, they take rules to be sacrosanct, disdaining evidence. That is, they take the quasi-Platonist view that a rule could in principle be valid even if nobody ever complied with it.
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The only sensible view, surely, is that although some speakers make mistakes on some occasions, matching the usage of competent speakers is the only possible basis for claims about grammatical correctness. Prescinding away from sporadic and accidental slips, the rules codify the practice of competent speakers. It’s not the other way round—that obedient speakers buckle down and bend their usage to comply with rules that exist independently of them!
As for the descriptive orientation, Collini’s characterization (“we can only record how people actually use language”) makes it a kind of obsessive, endless, Sysiphean fact-gathering without analysis.
Descriptive linguists do not, of course, believe that recording facts about language use must be the summit of our ambitions. Nor do they believe that anything that occurs is ipso facto correct. One or two linguists over the past 50 years have paid lip service to that ridiculous creed, but no linguist has seriously tried to live by it.
Any useful description will cover expressions that have not been used yet: There will be sentences that are unattested thus far but are tacitly claimed by the description to be grammatically correct.
Thence the acid test of linguists’ work: If a description of English such as the one given in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is accurate, the expressions that it implicitly defines as unattested but grammatical should include the sorts of things people actually say and write in the future. (Native speakers will of course have intuitions about whether such expressions are in their language, but speakers’ reports of their intuitions can be unreliable, so relying on intuitions to the exclusion of attested practice is methodologically unwise.)
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Collini’s caricature appeared in a review of three books about English usage, under the title “The Battle for the English Language,” and this subtitle: “Why are books about English grammar and correct usage so popular?”
It is surely not the slightest bit surprising that books on grammatical structure and correct usage in the world’s most widely used language should attract purchasers galore. The question to ask is why there is so little understanding, even among academics, of the actual work of descriptive linguists and serious codifiers of correct usage.