Prescriptive and Descriptive Approaches

Grammarians, philologists, linguists, and other language scientists find different ways to communicate about the rules that make up a particular language. One very basic distinction is the approach one takes toward this goal, namely to prescribe how the building blocks of a language are combined for proper use or to describe how this is done. Since prescriptive approaches are arguably ill-suited for research purposes and theory formation, modern linguistics—generative and nongenerative alike—adopts a descriptive approach. The descriptive approach also contributes to factors of adequacy, which is of particular interest to generative grammarians. This entry provides a brief overview of the prescriptive and descriptive approaches to the rules of a language.

A prescriptive approach focuses on talking about how a language ought to be used—how one should speak, what type of language to avoid, and so on. As such, linguistic prescriptivism involves siding with one variety or manner of speaking a language over another and includes judgments on what usages are socially proper or politically correct. Obviously, some degree of standardization is needed in language. A standardized variety of a language is necessary if the majority of speakers are to understand television programs, newspapers, books, and other means of mass communication. There is also a need for a standardized variety of language in the context of language learning, even if it is a little stilted and formal. Hence, a prescriptive approach is commonly taken in language classes, where the aim is to teach child or adult learners how to use language in a very particular way. The main aims of linguistic prescription are then to specify standard language forms either in general or for specific purposes (e.g., appropriate style and register in respective contexts) and to formulate these in such a way as to make them easily taught or learned.

In contrast, a descriptive grammar focuses on describing the language as it is used, not saying how it should be used. A descriptive approach would thus hold that a sentence is grammatical—or, using a more adequate term, acceptable—if a [Page 1460]native speaker would produce that sentence in speaking. The aim of linguistic analysis is to then try and describe how that sentence is produced through theorizing about the mental processes that lead to the surface form in order to provide a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise account of the patterns and use of a specific language or dialect, at a particular point in time. The aim of the descriptive approach to language study, then, is to describe the facts of linguistic usage as they are, rather than how they ought to be, with reference to an imagined ideal state.

With further relevance to theoretical linguistics, a generative grammar is said to be a set of formal rules, which projects a finite set of sentences upon the potentially infinite set of sentences that constitute the language as a whole, and it does this in an explicit manner, assigning to each a set of structural descriptions. As a theory of language, generative linguistics considers grammar to be a system of underlying rules that generate exactly those combinations of words, which form grammatical sentences in a given language. Among the types of grammar that are typically distinguished are descriptive grammar (aiming for a systematic description of a language as found in a sample of speech or writing as in, e.g., reference grammars or grammatical handbooks), theoretical grammar (using linguistic data as a means of developing insights into the nature of language as such, sometimes called formal grammar), comparative grammar (comparing the forms or states of a language with a combination of theoretical–descriptive methods), and traditional grammar (summarizing the range of attitudes and methods found in the prelinguistic era of grammatical study, usually used with a critical implication primarily at the prescriptive and proscriptive outlook).

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