The terms descriptivism and prescriptivism get thrown around a lot, and it seems most everyone says one of the words with a sort of dripping scorn that wouldn’t be out of place on the word “Communist” in the Army-McCarthy hearings. For many people, the difference between the two is black and white: one is the right philosophy and the other the wrong one. One improves language and the other ruins it.
There are a precious few who are able to avoid this facile good-vs-evil characterization, but they are a minority. I think many of you readers fall into this category, although I can’t say I always live up to your example myself.
The problem’s only exacerbated by the fact that even those who haven’t genericized these terms don’t necessarily agree on their boundaries. For some descriptivists, anyone who corrects any error is a prescriptivist. For some prescriptivists, updating a dictionary is descriptivist madness.
Many prescriptivists seem to use the word descriptivist as a term of generic revulsion, as though its definition were little more than “someone who disagrees with me”. (Similar to the genericization of fascist in 60s-era political discourse, socialist in contemporary political discourse, or hipster in my own discourse.) And descriptivists do the same to prescriptivist. Again, I’m as guilty of this as anyone.
So I felt like trying my hand at laying out what I think of as the division between descriptivists and prescriptivists, and why one can (and in fact ought to be) a little of both. Let me start off with a pithy summary of the debate between descriptivism and prescriptivism: is grammar something to be learned or something to be taught?
Descriptivism, in brief, is looking at what people say in a language and building up grammar rules from that. Prescriptivism, again in brief, is having a series of rules to tell you what should and should not be said. The difference in opinion between descriptivists and prescriptivists is often referred to as a “war”. I’m reluctant to say that’s overblown, because the gap between the two philosophies really exists and really is wide. But it’s based on a critical misconception: namely, that descriptivism and prescriptivism weigh in on the same matters.
They shouldn’t. A descriptivist philosophy is nothing more than saying that we need to be aware of the full range of allowable utterances in a language before we commit to its analysis. Descriptivism looks at what can possibly be said in a language. It’s at this level, for instance, that we can say that English is a Subject-Verb-Object word order language and not a Subject-Object-Verb language (like, say, Korean or Aymara), because virtually no one says I ball caught. This rule exists without explicit prescription.
A prescriptivist philosophy says that certain possible utterances are better than others. This sort of judgment may be based on aesthetics, clarity, prestige, or any other consideration. Here is where one can say that passive sentences should be avoided or that epic is gravely overused. But note that these rulings, unlike the descriptivist ones, do not determine validity of a sentence. Instead, these rulings tell what is a good usage, as opposed to a merely acceptable one. This is the critical difference between the -isms.
One can — and I believe must — be both a descriptivist and a prescriptivist in order to be a halfway decent language user. Descriptive knowledge lists your linguistic options, and prescriptive knowledge helps you decide between them. The trouble is that people have trouble keeping the two separate. Prescriptions mutate from “X is worse than Y” to “X is invalid” (see, for instance, Stan Carey’s posts on “not a word”). Some committed descriptivists overreach as well, arguing for a pure descriptivist viewpoint that treats all utterances as equally valid. (However, this seems a much rarer stance than overprescription.)
Why this is so difficult to get a handle on is unclear to me, and I say this as someone who’s only now starting to get a handle on it. It’s obvious in other fields, like architecture. An architect needs both to know what can be done (e.g., the maximum load a given beam can support) and what should be done (e.g., the aesthetics of a building). There are (I presume) no “prescriptivist” architects who would insist that an ugly but structurally sound building is “not a building” in the way that linguistic prescriptivists insist that ain’t isn’t a word.
Maybe the difference is that in architecture, structural soundness is fairly black-and-white, based on calculations and tables, and universal, subject to the same physical laws anywhere on Earth. In language, there are no easy references, and what’s valid in one language need not be in another. There is no rule that says ain’t must or mustn’t be a word, only the usage data that we ourselves, the speakers of English, have generated. I would think that would make it easier to see that language is flexible, yet many prescriptivists overlook the available usage information and insist that language should behave in a way that is largely independent of how language does behave. And many of them only stiffen their resolve when this is pointed out.
I’ve got one final thought, and that’s the contradiction that this site’s motto is “Prescriptivism Must Die!” and yet here I am saying that prescriptivism is important. What I think should die is captial-P Prescriptivism, the reliance on prescriptions and proscriptions everywhere, the barring of perfectly standard English or dialectal English because of misunderstandings, historical accidents, and other foolishly-constructed rules. It’s prescriptivism without descriptivism that must die, I suppose, but that’s more nuance than a motto can reasonably bear.
[I realized late in writing this post just how much it was inspired by Jonathon Owen’s post Continua, Planes, and False Dichotomies from October. If you haven’t read it, or forgot the details since the last time you read it, I strongly suggest you do, as it is in many ways a better version of this post.]
Motivated Grammar 
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April 5, 2012 at 4:15 pm
mikepope
Two thots. One: editors can easily straddle the chasm, since they might be philosophically descriptivists but do in fact, as their basic job description, police some number of rules (which as descriptivists, they’ll acknowledge as being to some extent arbitrary). I won’t say _every_ editor is this way, since I’ve certainly met my share of editors who do not have a foot on the descriptivist side of the gap, so to speak.
Two: fashion. There’s a difference between what’s possible and what’s appropriate. (There are even correctness conditions.) As far as I know, even prescriptivists wear bathing suits to the beach or baggy pants to mow the lawn in. :-)
Ok, also Three: I think you might be missing a segment of the prescriptivist philosophy where there’s an agenda that really not directly about language at all, but instead is about, dunno, moral decline, absolute authority, stuff like that. This would be (.e.g) Fiske and his distinctly unmerry band, who are not so much performing course correction on some usages that are going astray or helping business writers write more clearly, but are holding their collective finger in the dike against the Forces of Darkness. Those folks don’t coexist with NObody.
Whoops, that sounded catty. Sorry. :-)
April 5, 2012 at 5:24 pm
kateoz
Excellent – thank you. I have struggled with this, knowing “in my bones” they must both work together – but you’ve made it so clear. May I say this – the reason (I think) there are no prescriptivists in architecture, is that I believe there is very little that is as close to us, as part of us, as language. We kid ourselves if we think we can lay out structures and options and stop there – each of us has such a load of inferences, judgements, prejudices, preferences etc that we bring to language, that sometimes it’s almost physically painful to read or hear an expression or utterrance – it can reach to the very root of who we are, who we think we are or who we would like to think we are.
April 5, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Emily
Hear hear!
I also really like Mark Liberman’s post on this topic: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=748. The comments on that post are also worth a read.
April 5, 2012 at 11:20 pm
sekhargoteti
Nice post regarding description and prescription.
April 7, 2012 at 4:59 am
Eugene
These are fundamentally different enterprises. Descriptive linguistics is an endeavor to understand how languages work in the real world. Prescriptivism is, ideally, about how to use standardized language in formal, edited contexts.
As a language teacher, I’m necessarily a prescriptivist. I might discuss variation and non-standard usages, but I teach widely accepted, uncontroversial forms.
As someone trained in linguistics, I understand variation and language change. I look for the systematicity in language use. I think there are patterns and principles in how languages work, but there is no way to decide how a particular language “should” work. If you went into the field to write a grammar of an undescribed language, you wouldn’t think of telling the speakers how things should work. Why would we do this to English speakers?
There are, perhaps, three kinds of prescriptivism. 1) Empirically sound principles to guide you in writing or speaking in formal contexts. 2) Thoughtful discussions about disputed issues. 3) Unexamined opinions handed down through the generations.
Linguists are comfortable with #1. They are happy to engage with #2. They are eager to de-bunk instances of #3.
Most of the disputes arise when people try to apply the rules of formal, edited English to situations where informal usage occurs. Speakers do not use “whom” in informal contexts, for example. Whether you should use the dative/accusative form in writing is an editorial issue. It’s a legitimate prescriptive question. Whether people actually do use it is an empirical, descriptive issue.
So, before we even begin these discussions, we should establish whether we are talking about formal or informal usage. We should recognize that the standard language is an abstraction (a useful abstraction). We need to acknowledge that grammaticality differs by dialect. We have to allow for social variation and gender differences.
Most of the time we are talking past each other because we aren’t starting from the same premises.
April 9, 2012 at 3:38 am
stuartnz
What an excellent post, thank you! I collect posts like this one, and I’m definitely adding this one to my collection, with a couple of my old favourites http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001843.html
http://language.ourboldhero.com/2007/04/rogue-copy-editors-manifesto.html
April 9, 2012 at 7:32 am
Richard Hershberger
If we are to make a distinction between “prescriptivism” and “Prescriptivism”, then it would make sense to make a similar distinction between “descriptivism” and “Descriptivism”. Where your attempt at a calm via media discussion breaks down is that Descriptivism is a figment of the imagination (or very nearly so: no argument is so damn fool that no one is willing to make it). it is a very different matter with Prescriptivism. While it is ultimately doomed to ineffectualness, in the meantime there is a thriving Prescritivist cottage industry successfully instilling anxiety in the insecure while charging them for it.
April 9, 2012 at 11:58 am
Jonathon
Thanks for the link, Gabe, and great post.
As you and several of the commenters have noted, there are several different strands of prescriptivism, ranging from ignorant assertionism to well-informed and sensible advice on appropriateness. My advisor and I were talking about this the other day, and he suggested that what prescriptivism often lacks is a method of self-evaluation and self-criticism. There is only a limited amount of self-correction in prescriptivism (for example, most people now disavow the no-split-infinitives rule); for the most part, it’s simply a canonical tradition.
April 10, 2012 at 6:33 am
John Hightower
So when are you going to change your promo line “Prescriptivism must die”? It is exactly this type of language that causes the so-called descriptivists to get their hackles up. Is it not possible to also recognize that the so-called prescriptivists are not merely prescriptivists, but are motivated about concerns over COMMUNICATION? This concept of EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION never seems to enter into the conversation–that one way of communicating is BETTER than another because it produces the intended result.
Is it also not conceivable that the “prescriptivists” are arguing for a more stable and consistent language–so that communication across all groups can be facilitated?
April 11, 2012 at 1:31 am
Project Chiron
Reblogged this on Project Chiron and commented:
Another post on traditional grammar rules and common usage. (Check our reposts of Stan Carey’s post on Twitter’s “Who to follow” and the Economist piece titled “Whom do you trust?”) Are you a descriptivist or a prescriptivist? Do we even have to take sides?
April 12, 2012 at 10:06 pm
Flesh-eating Dragon
I think some people (among them Eugene in the comments) confuse “prescriptivism” with “prescription” and “prescriptivist” with “prescriptive”. An editor or language teacher has to be prescriptive (i.e. has to prescribe), but it doesn’t follow they have to be prescriptivist.
We could argue all day about how to define prescriptivism, and plenty of bloggers have made the point that sorting language attitudes into two camps is unhelpful because the real arguments are more nuanced than that. But when I hear the word, I think of someone who conflates personal opinions about good usage with objective fact. Likewise I think of a descriptivist as someone who believes it’s important to be mindful of the difference.
April 14, 2012 at 9:03 pm
Carol Wuenschell
The primary function of language is communication. All communication requires clarity, but it may also require precision, sublety, or artistry – depending on the nature of what is being communicated. I edit scientific texts to earn my keep and write fiction on the side. Most of the time, in both contexts, I find the rules are useful because they facilitate clarity. When, however, some rule forces me into a construction that feels awkward or unnatural and that does not serve my needs, I chafe. The language belongs ultimately to those who speak and write it, not to linguistic anthropologists or prescriptive grammarians. That said, it makes sense to look to those who use it with the greatest skill – the best communicators – so see how the language “should” be used.
April 29, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Lindsey
*Capital
But nice post.
May 8, 2012 at 10:07 am
Gabe
mike: Indeed. If one’s a descriptivist, editing is a great way to understand how a little bit of prescriptivism can be brought in without being hypocritical. But I wonder what’s the reverse — if one’s a prescriptivist, what’s the right way to introduce some descriptivism? Editing informal prose?
Eugene: The formal/informal point you raise is a very relevant one. Too much grammar advice comes in a nuance-free one-size-fits-all variety, under the assumption that one is writing very formally; in many ways, it’s like the advice in an old etiquette book, where one is forever assumed to be dining with royalty rather than friends or family.
Richard: Agreed. Though I have at times been upbraided by capital-D Descriptivists for suggesting that a certain form is more standard than another, those are much fewer and further between than Prescriptivist upbraidings.
Jonathon: That’s a great point. It seems that the only evaluation of a prescription is its internal consistency — and even then, it’s with a confirmation bias. If you can tell a coherent story why something’s wrong, you’re right, even if there’s compelling evidence (either in an argument or in general usage) why it’s right.
John: I think I addressed the motto in the post, and Flesh-eating Dragon more clearly states what I ought to have said: that there is a difference between making prescriptions and believing in prescriptivism. I certainly prescribe standard spellings in my writing, for instance, but I don’t believe that language is ruled by proclamations that something can be wrong even if everyone does it.
And sure, some prescriptions are motivated by clarity or precision — but many aren’t, and those that are are motivated without testing to see if the motivation is valid. I don’t, for instance, see how avoiding sentential “hopefully” is motivated. And maybe using “since” in place of “because” does muddle things, but there’s no reading-time or reading comprehension evidence of this.
FeD: Thanks — you stated that really well.
Carol: You’ve, in fact, hit upon how I learned to write better. Back in high school, when I was still shaping most of my personality, I latched on to aspects of people’s personalities that I admired, and part of that was speaking or writing styles. Unfortunately, I was fonder of Victorian-era writing back then, which is part of why I write so convolutedly at times.
The only trouble is that there are so many different writing styles even among the masters that it’s difficult to say what one should or shouldn’t do. But even then, it’s only a problem if you’re trying to tell people how to write instead of showing them what kind of things are good.
April 27, 2014 at 3:22 am
Richard
Great article, and thanks for sharing your inspiration. I loved Owen’s way of framing it.
September 16, 2014 at 5:13 am
Neil
No, they can’t. Descriptivists and Prescriptivists are destined to die with their hands around each other’s throats. Search your feelings. You know this to be true.
February 23, 2015 at 9:50 am
Are You a Prescriptivist or a Descriptivist?
[…] That may seem straightforward—and, like me, you may find the Urban Dictionary just as scary as Mrs. Polensky in tenth-grade English—but it’s not. It’s more like a war for some people (like Some Guy). As Gabe Doyle at Motivated Grammar notes, […]