One of the most common claims levelled against descriptivists, and against linguists of every stripe, is that our linguistic philosophy amounts to “anything goes”. Whenever anyone says something, the thought is, we will take it as a valid sentence in their language.
Of course, prescriptivists and other anti-descriptivists denounce this position as folly. But so do (almost) all descriptivists. The position is intellectually bankrupt. There are many reasons for an utterance not to be assumed to be grammatical. For instance, young speakers of the language speak pretty terribly (“I goed to the store”), so they clearly need to be exempted from the set of speakers establishing the grammar of the language. You will not find a linguist listening to a three-year-old and dutifully transcribing their speech as grammatical forms of the language.
But that one’s pretty obvious. In a more problematic case, we also know that people make grammatical errors that they subsequently recognize as errors. I know this especially well because every third post or so I get a comment or email asking if I didn’t make a grammatical error in a sentence, and often it’s because I did. I’m not talking about sentences that merely deviate from stylebook norms (YOUR PERIODS FOLLOW THE QUOTES YOU IDIOT!), but undeniably ungrammatical utterances like These is a big problem or worse. If it were really anything goes, you’d see linguists rushing to the defense of these ill-formed sentences even as I said “no, no, they’re not right!”
So let me try to state the maximally descriptivist position that I think a reasonable person could take. It’s that the set of grammatical utterances of a language is the set of utterances that can be made by speakers who have sufficient linguistic ability (i.e., adults who are fluent in the language) such that the speaker making that utterance does not find a problem with it after careful examination. More briefly, it’s the set of sentences that a qualified speaker would accept. But this is hardly “anything goes” — it’s more like “anything meeting certain standards goes”, and that’s a major philosophical shift. In fact, the difference between this theoretical “certain standards” descriptivist and a moderate prescriptivist is little more than a difference of what the standards are.*
And if we’re treating this as the descriptivist baseline, I have to confess that I am a bit less accepting than that. For me, the set of grammatical utterances is community-based; a sentence is grammatical in a linguistic community if and only if it is considered acceptable by a substantial portion of the linguistic community. Note that this is equivalent to the position I sketched above when the “community” is the individual; the difference is that my position does not extend the individual’s grammaticality judgments any further unless the rest of the community agrees.**
Now, the descriptivist philosophy I’ve outlined doesn’t rule out an additional prescriptive preference in stylistic matters, nor does it say that one can’t have a preference between two grammatical sentences. It is only defining the set of grammatical sentences. Most every descriptivist I know has these sorts of stylistic preferences. I, for instance, don’t like hyperbolic usages like figurative literally. Do I think they’re ungrammatical? No, not usually. But would I advise people to avoid them? Yes. And would people be right to ignore my advice? Sure, if they didn’t care what I think (and why should they?).
Lastly — and this is a point that Jonathon at Arrant Pedantry has made better in two of his posts, but it’s important enough to repeat — this means that descriptivism and prescriptivism aren’t necessarily at odds. You can be a descriptivist who acknowledges that something is an acceptable usage even as you avoid it yourself. And in fact, I know many self-described prescriptivist editors who hold this (I think eminently reasonable) position.
What’re your thoughts on the matter? If you’re a descriptivist, do you hold one of the philosophies I’ve sketched above, or something else? If you’re a prescriptivist, do you feel that your philosophy meshes with this sort of descriptivism, or do descriptivists still seem like whateverist hippies dancing in the ruins of English?
—
*: That little more, though, contains the philosophical difference I tweeted the other day: if usage and rules conflict, the descriptivist will base grammaticality on usage, the prescriptivist on rules.
**: To clarify, I think the maximal-descriptivist position is valid for describing idiolects, one’s personal form of the language. But for the purposes of delineating a dialect or language, it doesn’t matter if one person thinks a certain usage is good if all the rest of the world disagrees.
Motivated Grammar 
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November 7, 2011 at 10:46 am
John Cowan
I think the bellwether for descriptivism is negative concord. It’s clear on both synchronic and diachronic grounds that this is part of the baseline grammar of English and part of the SAE Sprachbund generally, yet there ain’t nobody willing to stand up for it, even though it is part of the standard in many SAE languages.
November 7, 2011 at 10:56 am
preciseedit
The issue of acceptability (I just can’t say “correctness”) being established by the receiving population is important.
One person, speaking to close associates, may say, “I been sick this week.” It’s wrong, according to the grammatical conventions of the larger society, but it may be acceptable within that culture (i.e., the population defined as that person’s friends). Here, it may be culturally correct to say “I been.”
However, if this person is speaking to me or writing to a broad audience that doesn’t share the same linguistic speech patterns, this is not acceptable. Members of the broader society may form a negative opinion of the person, perhaps questioning his academic background. Here, it will be culturally incorrect to say “I been.”
Given this, many people run into problems when they use their localized patterns (their “informal register”) in a broader context. The greater the context, the greater the need for more broadly acceptable language patterns.
Perhaps the argument between prescriptivist grammarians and descriptivist grammarians is the question of whether culturally appropriate language use equals grammatically correct language use. I argue that they are not the same.
November 7, 2011 at 10:59 am
amenable_mule
The difference between a prescriptivist and a descriptivist is the same as the difference between a dog owner and a zoologist. A zoologist values and accepts every individual deviation from the norm in any species. If the frequency of the deviation is sufficient enough to form a pattern, the zoologist writes a paper about it. On the other hand, a dog owner only wants her dog to behave well.
November 7, 2011 at 11:17 am
Gabe
John: that’s a pretty great counter-example. But I think the problem there is that we all gloss over the fact that “Standard” American English isn’t the true standard. What we call SAE is really a well-educated standard, a sort of aspirational standard that is partially prescriptive. It’s what editors are supposed to speak, not what the layman does speak.
Part of being a descriptivist is describing a language beyond black-and-white grammaticality. A descriptivist can say “this is standard, but also condemned by a vocal minority.” In fact, that’s what a descriptivist should say.
As for sticking up for it, I don’t think that a descriptivist has to or necessarily ought to. We each get to choose what we say, and we each get to choose where we deviate from the norms of language. Even prescriptivists seem to agree with that; witness David Foster Wallace’s idiosyncratic usage of “which”, something that I have to say I kind of like.
I do use negative concord at times myself; in fact, I did so over dinner last night in describing what I would have said to Kel Mitchell had we been introduced. (Long story.) And I use it to gain naturalness at the cost of formality, suggesting that it really is standard in my mind, just not prestigious.
November 7, 2011 at 11:20 am
goofy
I like this quote from Wardhaugh’s Proper English:
Whatever a grammar of a language is, it is largely impervious to human intervention. That is, the really interesting rules and principles are so basic that we cannot do anything at all about them. What we can do is try to influence some of the minor outcomes, for example, try to insist that people say I drank instead of I drunk or It’s I instead of It’s me. Essentially that is tinkering with matters of no linguistic consequence. To elevate the study of grammar to the task of trying to bring about “correction” in such matters is to trivialize that study. These matters may be of social consequence and often are, but that is a social observation and not a linguistic one, because I drunk and It’s me are linguistically on a par with I drank and It’s I. Furthermore, it is an observation that tells us much about social organization and the function of trivia in such organization and nothing about the structure of language.
November 7, 2011 at 11:27 am
Jonathon
I think preciseedit hits on an important point—the standards are not only community-based but context-based. There is no one standard against which utterances are judged, because there are different (and often conflicting) standards for every group and every situation.
And I’m not sure how much I agree with the qualification, “such that the speaker making that utterance does not find a problem with it after careful examination”. I’ve found that, when asked whether there were any problems with a given utterance, speakers can get very creative. They begin inventing errors that didn’t exist until they were asked to think about it. And then there’s the fact that a lot of people admit, sometimes even cheerfully, that they don’t follow “the rules” (“I ain’t got no good grammar!”).
But as to your final questions, I think this is a pretty good summation of descriptivism, and I think it meshes pretty well with my own brand of prescriptivism. Of course, I’m sure a lot of my coworkers find me exasperating when I stet all their changes, so I may not be the best one to ask.
November 7, 2011 at 11:29 am
Jonathon
Great quote, goofy. I checked that out from my university library once but never got around to reading it before I had to return it. I think I’ll have to get it again.
November 7, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Craig Morris
Some time last year (or so), I pointed out in a comment here that “despite the fact that” is just a long way of saying “although” – and the inevitable “there’s a difference in meaning between those two for me” came.
I maintain (as a card-carrying descriptivist) that there is such a thing as good writing, and one of the main tenets is to put say things as succinctly as possible.
November 7, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Flora
Preciseedit summed up my thoughts perfectly: how acceptable an utterance is has a great deal to do with context. And I think this is especially important when you consider writing vs. speaking. For me, having studied both linguistics and editing in college, I expect a certain adherence to standards in the written word that I’d never dream of demanding of people when they speak.
In speech, I’m quite tolerant of pretty much anything anyone wants to say; if it’s incoherent or thoroughly bizarre, I might raise an eyebrow, but hey, it’s their speech, and they can do what they want with it. I suppose I’ll gently correct my children, though, if ever I have any.
November 7, 2011 at 6:23 pm
CaitieCat
Craig Morris, the reductio ad absurdum of your point is that Lord of the Rings would have been a better book had it read:
Frodo found a ring. It was bad. He dropped it in hot fire, which broke it; also, his finger came off. He was sad, and got in a boat. The end.
Per your dictum, that’s “good writing”, because it’s more succinct than the original. ;)
Gabe, I think we are of one mind in our approach to descriptivism. Great post.
November 7, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Abbie
Is anyone with any interest in language/linguistics actually a prescriptivist? Isn’t that like a young-earth Creationist studying geology?
I think what we see most often is a kind of “utilitarian” prescriptivism. The stylistic conventions of standard english, however arbitrary/artificial they may be, are (at this point in time) valued highly by the segment of our society who calls the shots. You can take two roads on this: you can tell people to stick to the rules (knowing full well they’re arbitrary) because it’s advantageous. Or (this is my POV) you can take an approach that says we should stop privileging “socially acceptable” dialects over others. Until mutual intelligibility is a problem I say anything goes.
Of course one can make the argument that a standardized written form is important. But being prescriptivist about SPEECH is patently ridiculous in my book. People talk how they talk. Let em.
November 8, 2011 at 12:10 am
PAUL FANNING
Not sure about the claim: “For me, the set of grammatical utterances is community-based; a sentence is grammatical in a linguistic community if and only if it is considered acceptable by a substantial portion of the linguistic community”. While I agree with and like most of what is said in this post, I wonder about the words “considered acceptable” here. In my experience, it is quite possible for people to consider unacceptable what they themselves and a substantial portion of their peers often say. My approach to acceptability is statistical: if more than 50% of the occurrences of a lexical or structural item have a particular form, then that form is acceptable, regardless of what the community as a whole thinks of it. Does that make sense?
November 8, 2011 at 6:19 am
Stan
In an old post about descriptivism vs. prescriptivism (“War is over (if you want it)”), I made the case for common ground. As a scientist I incline strongly towards descriptivism, but as an editor I apply prescriptivist rules and guidelines as I see fit, or in accordance with a house style. There’s no clear boundary between them, and people tend to reconcile them idiosyncratically to suit their needs, hunches, and preferences. Robert Burchfield wrote that the two approaches converge, “esp. as shown in grammars prepared for schoolchildren and for foreigners”.
The “anything goes” position always struck me as a straw man: a way for extreme prescriptivists to paint descriptivists as wanton anarchists or cloud-cuckoolanders or “whateverist hippies” who simply don’t care about effective communication. I wasn’t aware there were linguists who actually held the position. A few months ago, in a post about the unironically titled Academy of Contemporary English and its enemies, I quoted David Crystal’s line: “The only people who use the phrase ‘anything goes’ are prescriptivists desperately trying to justify their prejudices.”
Now seems a good time to mention the phrase correctness conditions.
November 10, 2011 at 12:29 am
John Cowan
CaitieCat: As succinctly as possible, but no more so! But the point is wider: using no more words than necessary is one stylistic choice among many, in decorum for certain styles, not at all for others.
November 10, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Mar Rojo
But what of “We don’t need no education”? Would the people who use it be right in saying it is both culturally appropriate and grammatically correct?
November 10, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Mar Rojo
And what of correctness conditions?
“Barbara Scholz and I have taken to using the term correctness conditions for whatever are the actual conditions on your expressions that make them the expressions of your language — and likewise for anyone else’s language. If you typically say I ain’t got no hammer to explain that you don’t have a hammer, then the correctness conditions for your dialect probably include a condition classifying ain’t as a negative auxiliary, and a condition specifying that indefinite noun phrases in negated clauses take negative determiners, and a condition specifying that the subject precedes the predicate, and so on. The expressions of your language are the ones that comply with all the correctness conditions that are the relevant ones for you.”
Pullum
November 11, 2011 at 3:45 am
Eugene
They key concepts seem to be variation, standardization, and the different senses of the term “rules” as used in descriptive and prescriptive approaches.
Linguists recognize that variation is a natural and inevitable feature of all languages. Geographic variation (dialects), differences according to social groupings (sociolects), different usage in formal versus informal situations (register), and changes in language through time are some of the major dimensions of linguistic variation. Linguistics is an empirical discipline, so linguists describe how these systems work. Compare the way a meteorologist approaches the weather or a biologist treats an ecosystem – they start with a description and move on to generalization and hypothesizing. The meteorologist tells you what the weather is like today and what it might be tomorrow – there’s no question of what it should be, nor any sense that today’s weather is wrong and needs correction.
Most linguists (I think – you can read various positions at Language Log) accept the need for standardized language in education and the media.
When you submit your document for publication, you accept that the editor will ask for changes, and you’ll comply. When you speak in public, you understand that you’ll need to conform, more or less, to forms that are acceptable to a wide audience – forms that don’t call attention to themselves. In academic contexts, we all understand that conformity in language use is required. Prescriptivism is necessary in some contexts, as other commenters have pointed out.
Language teachers – I’m one – are engaged in a necessarily prescriptive endeavor. We don’t think that anything goes. We can’t teach every possible expression in every variety of the language, so we strive to teach generally useful, comprehensible, and acceptable language.
Most of us don’t mind sensible prescriptive usage rules. You can pick up the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage and trust the advise you fine there. They’ll give you intelligent discussions of usage controversies as well. Fowler’s isn’t bad, either.
Some usage issues will be controversial. That’s OK. Problems arise only when people with a prescriptivist attitude, who probably don’t own a good usage guide, want to impose their usage prejudices uncritically. In some cases they take a legitimate usage issue from edited Standard English and try to apply it to informal or spoken usage; in other cases they repeat complaints they’ve heard from other cranks about how ‘hopefully’ is terrible or how passive clauses should be eliminated, and they criticize others without doing even the most basic reading on the topic. Some people think that “I’m good” is an example of bad grammar.
What linguists who specialize in English really object to is bad prescriptivism, prescriptivism that is not based on any kind of empirical analysis of the language as it is actually used by proficient speakers and authors throughout the history of the language.
November 18, 2011 at 8:13 am
This Week’s Language Blog Roundup | Wordnik ~ all the words
[…] McIntyre shook his head over usage literalists, while Motivated Grammar asserted that descriptivism doesn’t mean “anything goes.” Lynneguist gathered a month’s worth of American and British English untranslatables; and […]
November 21, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Gabe
goofy: Gosh that’s good.
Jonathon: You’re right. “Careful examination” does lead to a lot of false negatives. No examination leads to a lot of false positives, and in between we see both.
Craig Morris: I agree that concision is a goal for effective writing, but the trouble is that there are other goals that push back against that. In difficult passages, concision becomes a problem. The trick is to figure out whre the appropriate balance lies.
Abbie: A lot of people interested in language are prescriptivists, but it’s because they’re not interested in linguistics. I liked amenable_mule’s point on the subject; for someone for whom language is a tool, having right and wrong ways to use it makes sense. For someone who’s studying linguistics, though, can’t be prescriptivist (or at least not a hard-line prescriptivist).
Paul Fanning: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. But the problem is that it means that there is at best one right way of saying something, and potentially no right way if there are sufficiently many alternatives. Some additional information, such as the absolute number of instances, is necessary to get a complete picture. And I still think that some amount of individual judgment is required to fully explain a language.
Stan: I really enjoyed that post, both when I first read it and now upon re-reading it.
Eugene: Indeed. I don’t really even mind prescriptive advice that I personally disagree, so long as if it’s presented as individual’s opinion and nothing more. The trouble only starts when the advice-giver turns it into a rule, or tries to use it as part of a larger point on the nature of language. I guess I’m just repeating what you said.
November 22, 2011 at 10:22 am
Robert
If we all listened to the proscriptivists, we’d all be speaking Indo-European.
November 22, 2011 at 10:25 am
Bill Walsh
I think that’s stated pretty well. I appreciate your qualifying with “(almost),” as I’ve run into “anything goes” hecklers just as I’ve run into members of my own tribe who confuse style choices with unbreakable rules. One former fan got very angry when I wouldn’t agree that a hyphen with an “-ly” adverb was a serious violation.
Here’s where this prescriptivist differs, in a nutshell, I think:
I would say that the community of speakers and writers who toss around “I could care less” and the non-literally “literally” while knowing full well what they’re doing is very, very small. Most, I think, would see the problem if it was pointed out to them and would appreciate the correction. You may agree or disagree with that, but if I’m right, that would seem to meet the criterion you laid out. Either way, I, of course, take that step and say they’re errors.
To echo the idea that we’re not necessarily all that far apart, I’d say that (almost) all reasonable prescriptivists use the e-word to mean roughly what linguists mean by “nonstandard usages,” and not to mean capital crimes.
November 24, 2011 at 2:09 pm
goofy
I see Bill’s point and I agree that many people could be persuaded that something like figurative “literally” is an error. But it doesn’t follow from that that it is an error. Personally I’m not persuaded by rhetoric, I’m persuaded by relevant evidence (i.e. usage of the writers and speakers I wish to emulate). And there’s a lot of evidence that figurative “literally” is considered acceptable by a substantial portion of the linguistic community (according to MWDEU).
November 30, 2011 at 9:53 am
ASG
It’s that the set of grammatical utterances of a language is the set of utterances that can be made by speakers who have sufficient linguistic ability (i.e., adults who are fluent in the language) such that the speaker making that utterance does not find a problem with it after careful examination.
I think this may be a bit optimistic! I used to think, naively, that forcing students to read their terrible sentences aloud would make it obvious how terrible they were. I’m not talking about fussy prescriptivist pseudo-rules like that/which distinctions and starting sentences with “but”; I’m talking about incomprehensible garbage, written by native speakers at the college level. These were sentences I simply could not parse. (I taught in a humanities department where students often believed they could get away with stringing lots of big words and “philosophical” ideas together, which may have been part of the problem.)
And yet, from time to time they’d read it aloud in a monotone then stare at me expectantly: what’s wrong with it, then? They were fluent speakers who could express themselves comprehensibly orally, but not only didn’t they know how to write, they didn’t know how to “carefully examine” what they’d written. I think a lot of them genuinely thought that’s what academic prose ought to look like.
December 1, 2011 at 11:29 am
Gabe
ASG: A great point. I noticed a similar thing when I was proofreading a cousin’s paper for a high school class: she’d written the paper in exactly the same way as she spoke. When she read the paper aloud, it mostly made sense, but it was very difficult to read. There’s a huge difference between what is acceptable when spoken and what is acceptable when written.
December 1, 2011 at 11:33 am
CaitieCat
There’s a huge difference between what is acceptable when spoken and what is acceptable when written.
A comment I make so often in my professional proofreading that I have it set up as a macro in Word. And I only do academic work by post-graduates. Most of whom, to be fair, are non-native speakers of English (I work mostly for people in computer and electrical engineering, and math/computer science, in a university town with a HUGE overseas student population). I remember being stunned last spring when I did some papers for a native speaker undergrad English major, that her performance in written English was so shoddy – until I realized as you did, that she was writing what she would say. I then just had to translate that into the more usual written form, and explain to her the differences.
I made a lot of money on that job, actually.
January 2, 2012 at 10:15 pm
Kendall
Language rules aren’t arbitrary. They’re based on logic. That’s why, for example, nouns have cases and verbs have conjugations. Those concepts exist not on some tyrant’s whim, but to meet the minimum needs of a group of people trying to exchange ideas.
“It is I” is correct because it’s logical for the nominative case to follow a linking verb (which is essentially an equal sign). “It is me” is incorrect because it equates two different cases. This correctness is fact, not opinion, because it’s based on the idea of cases, a idea without which language can’t function.
The only reason that not all language conforms to simple logic is that some people miss the logic and say something illogical, and their friends either don’t want to embarrass them or feel suddenly insecure about their own grasp of logic. This insecurity, and the resulting notion that grammar is somehow difficult or obscure, is socially manufactured. Pretending that someone who speaks illogically is correct is the same as pretending that an obese person is svelte. Lying may be nicer in this situation, but it doesn’t make anyone healthier.
Language and math are equally rooted in logic. Both use the left side of the brain, and both are uniquely human capabilities. Descriptivists may argue that math is universal while languages are many and varied, but the concepts that underlie all languages–cases, conjugations, etc.–are as universal as 1+1=2. The truth of that equation is no less subjective than the truth of “It is I.” Not all grammar rules are as simple as that equation, but nearly all are one or two degrees away from that simplicity. Some “rules” aren’t quite as logical, such as the don’t-split-infinitives thing, but disregarding all rules out of contempt for those is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Deviation from logic in language is useful only as far as it allows us to express our willingness to tolerate our friends’ foibles. But it’s more useful as a way to make ourselves clearly understood. Bad grammar may give one group’s members a sense of artificial community with one another, but it costs them much more by excluding them from bigger, more beneficial groups to which it’d behoove them to belong. If we want to show affection for our friends, there are many other, better ways to do that than to pretend they make sense when they blatantly don’t. That’s some Emperor’s New Clothes stuff.
Logic needn’t stifle creativity, expression, or group feeling. For instance, Ebonics can have cases and conjugate regularly while still being different from “SAE” in a thousand other ways, notably vocabulary (which needn’t be as tightly restricted as grammar, hence the plurality of languages).
One of my favorite novels is Beloved by Toni Morrison. Obviously, if every character in that book spoke logical, grammatical English, it would be a much less interesting book to me. But if the social circumstances that produced that language had been different–i.e., if an entire race of people had not been systematically deprived of the ruling class’s education for immoral economic reasons–those characters might well have been happier. Not as interesting, perhaps, but happier.
We can choose the social benefits of obeying a logical, inoppressive system that welcomes everyone, or we can secede from that because we see our rebellions as adorably idiosyncratic. As adults, we have the right to choose. But in making that choice, we should consider the 3-year-olds we correct who think themselves adorably idiosyncratic. Insisting that 1+1 doesn’t have to equal 2 and calling that linguistics rather than language may feel good as it relieves us of all mental labor, but it also makes us look silly and gets in everybody’s way. It saves us no time to put our pants on backwards, so why not put them on with the zipper in front?
April 10, 2012 at 1:25 am
amenable_mule
Kendall: Because language, especially grammar, is so logical that ‘you’ is both second-person singular and plural pronoun but ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ are not.
January 3, 2012 at 8:21 am
Gabe
Kendall: I disagree with nearly all of the points you’ve raised. The logic of math and language are different. The “truth” of It is I is not the objective truth of 1+1=2. The differences between languages are not primarily their vocabulary; try looking at a polysynthetic language like Greenlandic, and you’ll see that the differences from English are far more than mere words could impart. And lastly, your insistence that verbs having inflections (conjugations) is one of “the minimum needs of a group of people trying to exchange ideas” would be rather a surprise to speakers of Mandarin, whose verbs are uninflected.
December 30, 2013 at 8:44 pm
Kendall Rice
Just rediscovered this thread almost a year later! Here’s where we left it:
@amenable_mule: Obviously, our pronoun roster has changed. The number distinction used to exist between “thee/thou” (singular) and “ye→you” (plural), by exactly the same logic that divided “we” from “I,” “us” from “me,” and “them” from “he/she/it.” Over time, speakers decided that in the second person, the plural conferred a deference that was socially valuable to confer on single people as well as groups. Over more time, the deference weakened and “you” became standard in both numbers. The underlying logic dividing singular from plural was not abandoned; it was merely traded, in one situation, for what was felt to be a greater benefit. Sorry if you were hoping this example would prove language has no connection to logic.
@Gabe: Math and language use different kinds of logic—numeric vs. semantic—but semantics is logic, and a faculty for it is hard-wired into the human brain. Different languages merely use different software to express the relations between the universal semantic roles. The role of patient, for example, is in the active voice marked in English and Chinese by placement after the verb, in Latin by -m, in Japanese by -o, in Korean by -l, and in Greenlandic by I don’t know what but surely something. I’d never suggest that all languages should indicate semantic roles the same way English does, since I view diversity as a good and would be bored in such a world! But any one language should indicate semantic roles, and it should do so the same way every time (barring temporary exigencies like focusing). Not sure where you saw in my reasoning a preoccupation with vocab at the expense of grammar, but sorry for the misunderstanding. Re: the role of conjugation in Chinese, it’s syntactic rather than morphological, relying on free morphemes (adverbs) rather than bound ones (affixes) like most languages. If you don’t want to call that “conjugation,” fine; but tense-indicating Chinese adverbs and tense-indicating English (or Latin, or Japanese, or Korean) endings do the same work, which must be done to meet, yes, the minimum needs of a human speaker. People want to know when an action happens and how complete it is. There are a wealth of ways to express these things, but they are and must be expressed.
July 14, 2014 at 6:29 pm
Ain’t that interesting! On prescriptivism and why it’s silly. | Aleksandra Kasztalska
[…] formally (as politicians or news broadcasters do, for example), so most descriptive linguists are not arguing that all prescriptive rules should be abandoned or that “anything goes” …. What they are arguing is that these rules are socially-constructed and, since they are most […]
July 14, 2014 at 6:36 pm
Ain’t that interesting! An introduction to the linguistic, descriptive study of language | Aleksandra Kasztalska
[…] formally (as politicians or news broadcasters do, for example), so most descriptive linguists are not arguing that all prescriptive rules should be abandoned or that “anything goes” …. What they are arguing is that these rules are socially-constructed and, since they are most […]
March 4, 2015 at 12:12 pm
Why Descriptivsts are Usage Liberals | Arrant Pedantry
[…] but they aren’t opposites at all. But no matter how many times we insist that “descriptivism isn’t ‘anything goes’“, people continue to believe that we’re all grammatical anarchists and linguistic […]
March 4, 2015 at 3:26 pm
Why Descriptivists are Usage Liberals | Arrant Pedantry
[…] but they aren’t opposites at all. But no matter how many times we insist that “descriptivism isn’t ‘anything goes’“, people continue to believe that we’re all grammatical anarchists and linguistic […]
October 4, 2020 at 11:10 am
tstcikhthys
@Kendall: Wholeheartedly agree! You’ve succinctly summarized what I’ve been saying for the past 10 years. My theory is that the problem with descriptivists is that they don’t seem to recognize the inherent inadequacies in “language maintenance institutions” that existed for basically all of linguistic history. The fact that language evolved historically was more likely due to the fact that it was transmitted orally, or in written form where the knowledge of how to interpret and reproduce said written form was, yet again, transmitted orally. Seeing as that was highly susceptible to being morphed, language thus evolved.
As a society/world, we’ve largely solved both of these issues by way of dictionaries, spell checkers, pronunciation audio files, videos on place/manner/voicing of articulation of sounds, etc. Insofar as people still make mistakes in spelling, grammar, etc., this largely has to do with lapses in education systems than it does with “natural evolution”. The number of new words being coined or new meanings being assigned for pre-existing words is a minuscule portion of the so-called “evolution” that is happening in language today. In fact, the importance of technological tools has become so great to the point that we have to take care to make sure we’re not amplifying mistakes. For example, if you go to Google and type things like “extravert” or “metre”, it will suggest “extrovert” and “meter” as canonical versions of those because it is biased from a US English, popular usage perspective. Given the trust people place in such institutions, even people who otherwise are knowledgeable are made to think twice and change their usage one way or another. So we ought to look at ways of making our education systems more effective rather than pretending that any and every variation is an adorable idiosyncrasy that warrants being entertained.