📗 Descriptive v/s Prescriptive Approach to Language
🌪Descriptive Approach
🔻Linguists attempt to describe the grammar of the language that exists in the minds of its speakers, i.e. to create a model of speakers’ mental grammar.
🔻The resulting descriptive grammar describes person’s basic linguistic knowledge and explains how it is possible to speak and understand and it summarize what speakers know about the sounds, words, phrases and sentences of their language.
🔻Creating a descriptive grammar involves observing the language and trying to discover the principles or rules that govern it.
🔻Descriptive rules accept as given the patterns speakers actually use and try to account for them.
🔻Descriptive rules also allow for different dialects of a language and even variation within one dialect.
🌪Prescriptive Approach
🔻Prescriptivists tell you someone’s idea of what is “good” or “bad”.
🔻Prescriptive rules make a value judgment about the correctness of certain utterances and generally try to enforce a single standard.
🔻The people who use prescriptive grammar make up the rules of the grammar.
🔻They attempt to impose the rules for speaking and writing on people without much regard for what the majority of educated speakers of a language actually say and write.
🔻So-called prescriptive grammar usually focuses only on a few issues and leaves the rest of a language undescribed. In fact, from the linguistic point of view,
this is not grammar at all.
📗 Prescriptivism v/s Descriptivism
In short, linguists describe language, but they do not prescribe it.
🔻As a science, linguistics is not in the business of making value judgments about language use.
🔻It studies how language really is used and then attempts to describe the facts, in order to analyze and, eventually, explain them.
🔻An Analogy:
• Physicists don’t complain that objects fall to earth, but simply observe and describe the fact of falling, then try to discover the laws that are behind it.
📗 The Parts of Grammar
🔻Grammar is a language system, a set of principles (rules) that underlie a language.
🔻Mental Grammar – the knowledge of language that allows a person to produce and understand utterances.
🔻Grammar can be described as having different parts, such as:
• phonetics
• phonology
• morphology
• syntax
• semantics
• pragmatics
Since linguists study all of these, the terms are also used to refer to subfields of linguistics.
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