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Discussion Questions: Prescriptive Grammar |
1. Contrasting Prescriptive and descriptive rules. In the table below are pairs of prescriptive rules and descriptive counterparts. Underneath each pair of rules are three sentences. Place a star next to the sentence or sentences which would be ungrammatical according to the PRESCRIPTIVE RULE. (All the sentences should be grammatical according to the descriptive rule.) Write "YES" or "NO" depending on whether you think you follow the prescriptive rule in your speech. The example with slow/slowly is adapted from the example in the APS book.
2. Traditional prescriptive categories (solecisms, barbarisms, improprieties). Below is a list of usages which one or more prescriptivists have observed and objected to. State which of the traditional categories (solecisms, barbarisms, improprieties) the usage would all into and why prescriptivists find the usage unacceptable.
a. "In Washington you don't talk with people; you 'interact' with them. When two individuals with opposing viewpoints meet, they 'interface'. Just as a witness who prevaricates is said to be 'stone-walling,' so the vogue persists for other Watergate phrases--among them, 'at this point in time' as the long way of saying 'now'."
Barbarisms: buzzwords or bureaucratese for special effect or to show you are part of the "in group".
b. "A San Francisco Examiner story was headlined: 'Climber peaks inside volcano.'"
Impropriety: "peak" instead of "peek", shows ignorance of correct spelling.
c. "We were always taught to say 'drive slowly,' yet our highways are cluttered with signs that say 'Drive Slow.'"
Impropriety: grammar mistake (see first example in question #1).
d. Abigail Van Buren apologized for having written "from whence" because the word "whence" means "from what place, from what source, from what origin".
Solecisim: redundancy, since the word "whence" includes the notion "from".
e. "a proposed thermal solid waste conversion facility" (= "incinerator")
Barbarism: wordy, grandiose phrase to describe an object of humble function.
f. "To use 'alternate' as a synonym for 'alternative' is considered to be a sign of semiliteracy outside the USA. The two words really do have quite separate and distinct meanings: 'alternate' imples the taking of turns, and 'alternative' implies a choice."
Impropriety: word misusage, loss of a useful distinction because the users fail to pay attention to the difference.
g. " news media persons say 'a million and a half dollars' when they mean 'one and a half million dollars'"
Solecisim: the claim is that the first means $1 million 50¢; an error in logic if one thinks about what the language really means.
3. Commnets of a Jeremiah. Below is what the Jeremiah, John Simon, has to say about the word nice and about language change in general (Paradigms Lost, pp. 209-210). [NOTE: Nice comes from Latin ne-scius 'ignorant, not-knowing'; in Old French, it meant 'silly' and was borrowed into Old English with that meaning; by the time of Middle English, it had take on the meaning 'foolish', later 'shy'; the Modern English meaning comes from the latter meaning, i.e. 'non-aggressive, accommodating'.--RGS]
"For consider that what some people are pleased to call linguistic evolution was almost always a matter of ignorance prevailing over knowledge. There is no valid reason, for example, for the word nice to have changed its meaning so many times-except ignorance of its exact definition. Had the change never occurred, or had it been stopped at any intermediate stage, we would have had just as good a word as we have now and saved some people a heap of confusion along the way. But if nice means what it does today-and it has two principal meanings, one of them, as in 'nice distinction,' alas, obsolescent-let us, for heaven's sake, keep it where it is, now that we have the means with which to hold it there."
How might Linguists react to Simon's view of language change?
Simon is clueless about language change and its causes; he seems to think there is some "meaning" affixed to a word separate from the way speakers use it.
4. Another jeremiad. Here is another quote from John Simon (Paradigms Lost, pp. 205-206) about a putative solecism. Again, how might a Linguist respond to Simon's diatribe?
"And if someone now says that 'in George Eliot's lesser novels, she is not completely in command' is perfectly comprehensible even if it is ungrammatical, 'she' having no antecedent that is a substantive (Eliot's is a modifier), I say, 'Comprehensible, perhaps, but lopsided,' for the civilized and orderly mind does not feel comfortable with that 'she' unless the sentence is restructured as 'George Eliot, in her lesser novels, is not' or in some similar way. In fact, the fully literate ear can be thrown by this error in syntax; it may look for the antecedent of that 'she' elsewhere than in the preceding possessive case."
Simon's concept of grammatical categories is naive at best. He claims "Eliot's" is a "modifier", which is not a "category" in any case, but rather a function that a word of some category (adjective, adverb, noun) might have. "Eliot" is a NOUN in any system of grammar--here a noun with a possessive 's on it, but a noun nonetheless. A noun can ALWAYS be the "antecedent" to a pronoun when it comes earlier in the sentence than the pronoun. In short, Simon has cooked up a prescriptive rule that a noun marked as a possessor functions as a "modifier" rather than as a noun and hence cannot be referred to by a pronoun--a "rule" which is not now nor has it ever been part of English grammar.
5. The Wordwatcher and the Linguist. Here are two "wordwatcher" accounts that include the word cathedral. The first is from Robert Clairborne, Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, Norton, 1988; the second is from Peter Davies, Roots, McGraw-Hill, 1981. (The latter book shows how various English words trace their histories back to their Indo-European origins.) How might a Linguist react to these two "wordwatcher" accounts?
cathedral. In Greek, kathedra means a chair; the term was later applied to the ceremonial chair or throne of a bishop. A cathedral church (later, simply cathedral) was thus the "seat" of a bishop. And when someone speaks ex cathedra, they're assuming the authoritative (and perhaps somewhat pompous) manner of a bishop or other high dignitary. Some professors are fond of making ex cathedra statements.
Clairborne's little discussion would probably evoke the reaction, "Yeah, so tell us something." It takes one word in isolation and says where it comes from, followed by a couple of gratuitous remarks about othe uses of the Latin word cathedra. The Davies diagram, on the other hand, puts the word 'cathedral' and the other Indo-European derivatives to which it is realted into a linguistic and cultural context. Clairborne's isolated little story can be seen to be just a minor piece in a much larger picture.
6. Prescriptive "Pet Peeves". Below is a list of "pet peeves" related to language usage which Abigail Van Buren ran in a column (Los Angeles Times, 7/15/92).
a. Which, if any, of them do you share? What are some of your pet misusage peeves?
b. Linguists can be prescriptivists, too, but one thing the study of linguistics should teach is that there are "lost causes" (usages which have worked their way into normal speech to the point where most people view them as completely normal) and there are usages which, if their undesirability is drawn to speakers' attention, the speakers would probably see their error and change their ways. Which of these categories would the pet peeves below or ones that you might add fall into?
[Reactions to these usages is largely a matter of personal opinion--I don't suggest any "answers".]
7. Prescriptive complaints in other languages. If you are a native speaker of a language other than English, try to make a list of language usages that you or prescriptivists condemn in your language. Try to put them into the categories we have discussed--solecisms, barbarisms, improprities--or the "lost causes" vs. "hopeful" types mentioned in the preceding question.
[Again, an infinite number of possible answers, depending on language and personal judgments.]