CJ,

Something to think about.

I am going to let those with greater interests and better backgrounds solve that mystery.

I am going to slink back into lurking mode on this thread.



MountainHiker

MrP,

With just a few mouse clicks, I think I might have found your answer: http://www.lsadc.org/members/index.php?aaa=b.htm

You will have to search for Bailey on the page. It's pretty easy. I am having you go and look at the page to make sure that I have the correct person. Otherwise, I would just provide the email here.

MountainHiker

Please click here for Su Cheng Zhong's post about the vocabulary problem in modern English.

Post:73175

Moved to its own thread by MrPedantic.

MrP,

Maybe just start it for him? He might not be logged on or paying attention. Simply remove his stuff, place a link to the new thread and delete our posts here.

MH

Let's start at the beginning. What's the difference between "prescriptive" and "descriptive"?

If I am speeding down Highway 101, I am violating the laws of California; I am not violating the laws of physics.

In this sentence the word "laws" occurs twice - first, meaning "prescriptive laws" - and second, meaning "descriptive laws". Laws or rules created by societies in order to govern behavior are prescriptive. Laws or rules "discovered" by scientists from observations of nature are descriptive.

I place "discovered" in scare quotes because in fact descriptive rules are not so much discovered as they are invented. The scientist cannot dictate to nature how to behave; he cannot make a prescriptive rule. He must 'reverse engineer' what he observes in nature so that the law he invents predicts the behavior of nature AS IF it were a prescriptive law. It is only because of its superficial resemblance to something prescribed that a "law" of nature can be called a law at all. But not being anything more than a descriptive law, a best guess at a description, it is impossible to violate it. Returning briefly to the opening highway example, then, we have to say that it is impossible for me, by speeding -- indeed by any action I might undertake -- to "violate the laws of physics", for it is impossible to violate a description! If any phenomenon appears to violate a law of nature, it is the "law", i.e., the description, which is to blame for its inaccuracy, rather than a prescription which has been violated.

As history marches on, new and startling observations of nature are made for which the old descriptive laws are inadequate. The history of science is strewn with such stories. The laws of nature known so far must be adjusted or thrown out and new laws must be made, the idea being that the laws must be able to describe accurately all the observations of nature, including even the most recent and bizarre, the most anomalous from the point of view of the current laws, theories, or descriptions, call them what you will.

Linguistics, the "science of language", operates the same way. The idea is that, rather than all of nature, only linguistic phenomena will be considered as the raw data of linguistic science. Laws or rules will be invented by which language may be accurately described. The laws, if accurate, will be able to describe language or any one particular language so well that we should be able to use these rules to determine for any utterance of the language whether it is grammatical or ungrammatical. Even a computer should be able to decide on grammaticality under this view of the science.

Now the catch is that to build a rule system that differentiates between the grammatical and the ungrammatical, you have to have an idea of what a grammatical sentence is or isn't. And what the linguists say is that if native speakers judge a sentence as grammatical, then it counts as grammatical. (Since these terms are too often associated with "correct" and "incorrect" - prescriptive terms - unscientific terms - linguistics often substitute "well-formed" for "grammatical". -- Who ever heard of telling a molecule that it was behaving incorrectly?!) It is very important to realize that the linguist does not consult any handbooks of grammar, of course! Nothing of the kind! The raw data of the science is what people actually feel intuitively is grammatical -- what "sounds right" to a native speaker. Most often, rather than ask thousands of people how they feel about thousands of sentences vis-a-vis their grammaticality, the linguist takes the reasonable shortcut of studying a whole corpus of material. At this point the definition of grammaticality becomes something like "whatever people actually say or write." The big problem is then how to invent rules which thoroughly describe the entire corpus and, by extension, the entire language. If the last 50 years is any indicator, a great deal of terminology about a great deal of theoretical machinery has to be invented to describe language well.

Note that physicists do not tell an engineer how to design and build a car. They only describe nature in such a way that the descriptions are useful to engineers in designing and building cars. The physicist is the scientist, and the engineer is the technician. Within the world of physics there are nearly limitless phenomena which an engineer-technician might wish to explore in the quest for a better technology for building cars. But in the real world, there are so many restrictions of time, energy, and cost, not to mention social factors, that engineers do not, for these practical reasons, spend their time creating their dream cars. In the practical world, engineers develop "rules of thumb" to guide their designing activities. Certain patterns are known to work from experience. Newton's laws are sufficient for manufacturing cars; one need not use Einstein's equations for the speeds at which cars move. The result is that engineers end up developing a body of prescriptive rules for car-building because it's easier and more practical. These 'prescriptive' rules do not violate the rules of physics. They are a useful subset.

It should be obvious that the linguist is the scientist and the English "grammar" teacher in the classroom is the engineer. Certain patterns are of obvious use to the classroom teacher and to the learner of English. There is therefore a tendency to codify these rules and make them prescriptive. These 'prescriptive' rules do not violate the rules of linguistics. They are a useful subset.

It should also be obvious that "prescriptive" and "descriptive" are not mutually exclusive. Some writers consistently treat the two as diametrically opposed. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it should be noted that the writers who, in their enthusiasm for descriptive linguistics, propose that the use of any prescriptive techniques is wrong are like a physicist telling an engineer that the engineer doesn't know how to build a car!

___________

I probably could have developed the analogies a little better, but looking over it, I think I hit the main points of what I wanted to say.

I hope it straightens out a few things and maybe even stimulates a little discussion.

California Jim