Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
While descriptive focuses on facts and observations, prescriptive emphasizes norms and values. When it comes to analyzing and understanding language, two important approaches are descriptive and prescriptive. These approaches provide different perspectives on how language should be studied and used.
Prescriptivism involves the laying down of rules by those claiming to have special knowledge of or feeling for a language. Prescriptive advice tends to be conservative, changes being regarded with suspicion if not disdain. Descriptivism involves the objective description of the way a language works as observed in actual examples of the language.
As the phrase implies, you can think of it as a grammar prescription, a prescription being a list of things you should do—like the prescription for medicine that a doctor prescribes for you. Descriptive grammar, in contrast, simply describes the way people actually speak.
In linguistics, we want to describe how language is used, called the descriptive approach, rather than judging how language should be used, called the prescriptive approach.
Descriptive linguistics seeks to uncover the underlying rules and principles of language, while prescriptive linguistics seeks to uphold a standard of language usage based on perceived correctness. One key difference between descriptive and prescriptive linguistics is their attitude towards language variation.
Descriptive grammar is concerned with language as it is spoken and written in practice, while prescriptive grammar is concerned with how language should be spoken and written according to established rules.
What is the difference between a prescriptive statement and a descriptive statement? A descriptive statement captures something the way it is. A prescriptive statement details how something...
The main difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar is that the descriptive grammar describes how the language is used whereas the prescriptive grammar explains how the language should be used by the speakers.
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.
As a scientific undertaking, descriptive grammars precede prescriptive grammars: a language needs to be carefully and thoroughly studied and described before any sort of prescriptions can be formulated.