What are prescriptive and permissive attitudes to language
Answers
Linguistics 001 Lecture 3 The Language Wars
Prescriptive and descriptive linguistics
Some people think that linguistics is -- or should be -- all about how to speak or write properly. Others believe that the role of linguistics should be only to describe how people actually do speak and write, without making value judgments or trying to establish normative rules.
The shorthand terms for the two sides of this disagreement: prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics.
As we'll see, linguistics can certainly be used prescriptively, and often is. And the results of careful description and analysis are at least implicitly normative.
However, modern linguists insist that value judgments about language should be recognized as such, and should be examined in the light of the facts. As a result, some critics feel that linguists' attitudes stand in the way of the establishment and maintenance of language standards. You can find a sample of the debate in Geoff Nunberg's classic article Decline of Grammar , or Mark Halpern's riposte A War That Never Ends .
Negotiating a truce
There are genuine differences of opinion about language policy. Linguistic analysis lets us state the issues clearly -- when this is done, people sometimes disagree less than they thought they did about "correctness" in English.
In particular, we can distinguish four types of "correctness":
Established criteria of educated written language
third-person singular /s/: "she goes," not "she go."
no double negatives: "he didn't see anybody," not "he didn't see nobody."
complete sentences
"ain't", "might could"
Issues on which educated people differ (and which may be different in written and spoken forms, or in different registers of writing and speech):
"who/whom did you see"
"Winston tastes good like/as a cigarette should"
"the data is/are unreliable"
"I disapprove of them/their doing it"
"get it done as quick/quickly as possible"
"hopefully, she'll be there on time"
Contractions
Changes in the spoken language that some people resist:
"between you and I"
"me and Harry went downtown"
"was" (or "was all", "was like") for "said"
Pure inventions of self-appointed grammarians with little or no basis in actual usage:
prohibition of sentence-initial conjunctions
prohibition of dangling prepositions
"I shall" vs. "you will"
"It is I"
prohibition of split infinitives and "split verbs"
prohibition of "less" with countables
There is a range of attitudes about "correctness" among the world's languages, from unconstrained vernacular evolution to maximal standardization and codification:
Pidgins and creoles, which develop rapidly among speakers who need a new common language -- for instance:
Haitian Creole (6+ million speakers in Haiti and the U.S.)
Tok Pisin (2 million speakers in Papua New Guinea)
Jamaican Creole or Patois (2 million speakers)
Hawaiian Creole (1/2 million speakers)
Palenquero (3,000 speakers in Colombia)
Unwritten languages -- or languages where writing is hardly ever used -- whose form is set by spoken interaction only:
Ilocano (5.3 million speakers, Philippines)
Chagga (800,000 speakers, Tanzania)
Buang (10,000 speakers, Papua New Guinea)
Written languages with no academies -- for instance
English (400 million speakers)
Marathi (65 million speakers)
Languages with academies
French (109 million speakers; academy established 1635)
Spanish (266 million speakers; academy established 1713)
Hungarian (14.4 million speakers; academy established 1830)
Hebrew (2.7 million speakers; academy established 1953)
Languages codified to preserve an archaic form, for instance:
Latin
Old Church Slavonic
Sanskrit
Language preservation
The roots of linguistics are actually to be found in the needs of the last two, most prescriptive, categories of "