Descriptive &

Prescriptive Grammar
By: Eve Loraine A.Trinidad
BSED-English
Eng. 108
What is Grammar?

• The word grammar comes from Greek, meaning "craft of letters,"

which is an apt description. In any language, grammar is:
• 1. The systematic study and description of a language. (Compare
with usage.)
• 2. A set of rules and examples dealing with
the syntax and wordstructures (morphology) of a language.
What is Descriptive Grammar & Prescriptive
Grammar
• Descriptive grammar (definition #1) refers to the structure of a
language as it's actually used by speakers and writers.
• Prescriptive grammar (definition #2) refers to the structure of a
language as certain people think it should be used.
• Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules—but in different ways.
• Specialists in descriptive grammar (called linguists) study the rules or
patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.
• On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians (such as most editors and
teachers) lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct” or
“incorrect” use of language
More on Descriptive Grammar

• Descriptive grammar is a set of rules about language based on how it is actually

used. In a descriptive grammar there is no right or wrong language.
• It can be compared with a prescriptive grammar, which is a set of rules based
on how people think language should be used.
• Example:
• A descriptive grammar might include ‘He goes...', meaning ‘He said’.
• In the classroom learners can be encouraged to move away from a prescriptive
approach to grammar by using a guided discovery, or inductive, approach, in
which they look for examples of variations in use in authentic texts.
• These examples can be compared to prescriptive rules in order to decide if they
are useful or not.
DESCRIPTIVE AND PRESCRIPTIVE
GRAMMAR.Contrasting terms in LINGUISTICS.
A descriptive t of a language that seeks to describe how it is used objectively, accurately,
systematically, and comprehensively.
A prescriptive grammar is an account of a language that sets out rules (prescriptions) for how it
should be used and for what should not be used (proscriptions), based on norms derived from a
particular model of grammar.
For English, such a grammar may prescribe I as in It is I and proscribe me as in It's me. It may
proscribe like used as a conjunction, as in He behaved like he was in charge, prescribing instead
He behaved as if he were in charge.
Prescriptive grammars have been criticized for not taking account of language change and
stylistic variation, and for imposing the norms of some groups on all users of a language.
They have been discussed by linguists as exemplifying specific attitudes to language and usage.
Traditional grammar books have often, however, combined description and prescription.
The term prescriptive grammar refers to a set of norms or rules governing how a language should
or should not be used rather than describing the ways in which a language is actually used.
Contrast with descriptive grammar. Also called normative grammar and prescriptivism.
Prescriptive Grammar

• A you probably already know, prescriptive grammar usually refers to artificial rules imposed
on a language community.
• These rules come in all shapes and sizes, but generally they come in a few major varieties.
• Sometimes these rules are archaic rules leftover from earlier in the history of the language.
• These rules have been abandoned by most in the language community, but persist in use by a
select few.
• For example, the proper use of “who”:
• *Who did you arrest?
• Whom did you arrest?
• Many will claim that only the sentence in (2) is grammatically correct.
• This belief derives from an older version of English in which the nominative and accusative
cases (subject and object respectively) were more important.
• Today these cases only persist in pronouns, and even there they are slowly dying off.
Prescriptive Grammar

• Another common prescriptive rule is by analogy with some other

language, usually one with prestige.
• Historically, this has occurred in English with Classical Latin quite
commonly.
• For example, ending a sentence with a preposition:
• *What are you waiting for?For what are you waiting?
• Although this rule is less rigorously applied today, in the past many have
claimed that you should not end a sentence with a preposition, such as
in (1) above.
• This rule never existed in the English language—instead, it was taken via
analogy from Classical Latin, which, for morphological reasons that I
won’t go into here, could not really end sentences with prepositions.
Prescriptive Grammar

• Probably my favorite kind of prescriptive rule is hyper-correction. These rules

come about when a feature from another language is borrowed and over-
applied.
• For example, this commonly happens in English when a plural feature is
borrowed from another language such as in the Greek word “octopus”:
• *I saw several octopuses at the beach.
• I saw several octopi at the beach.
• These rules thankfully don’t usually have a long life, even among prescriptive
grammarians.
• This rule, for instance, has been all but eradicated—it is now generally
accepted that the correct plural in Greek would indeed be the same as the
English productive plural, “octopuses” (I do not speak Greek, admittedly, but
this is what I have heard).
Descriptive Grammar

• Descriptive grammar, however, consists of rules that all speakers of a speech

community adhere to, barring speech errors.
• These are the rules that Linguists are usually more interested in, as they are
reflective of the properties of actual language, not ideal language. When these
rules are violated, there is usually a clearer intuition that something bad has
happened.
• For example, a typical case of reflexive pronouns:
• *I saw me in the mirror, and I looked good.
• I saw myself in the mirror, and I looked good.
• Mind you, there could be some speech communities that find (1) grammatical, but
generally speaking, English speakers would not utter (1) purposefully.
• There is an observable rule in English that requires reflexive pronouns to be
pronounced as an anaphor, rather than as a standard object pronoun.
Descriptive Grammar

• I’ll also list a few more examples of descriptive grammar rules in action.
Note that I am not saying these constructions are right/wrong for all
dialects of English, just my dialect of English (General American):
• *I looked for hospital.
• I looked for a/the hospital.
• English typically requires a determiner/article before a common noun.
• *Me went to the beach.I
• went to the beach.
• As I mentioned earlier, case is still active for pronouns.
Descriptive Grammar

• You have to use the proper pronoun depending on whether the

position is a subject or an object (at least for the first person
singular pronoun).
• *She liked to shot birds.
• She liked to shoot birds.
• Embedded infinitival clauses can’t display overt tense, which in
this case rules out (1), since “shot” is the past tense form of the
bare verb “shoot.”
Thank You for listening. 😊