A linguist's considered view on the prescriptive vs. descriptive controversy

There are rules, but they are emergent and they are fluid.

I read a lot of books of popular science. I must own a thousand myself and take new ones out of the library all the time. They are usually utterly fascinating. I can’t do quantum mechanics, but I can get a sense of the principles so I can read other popular articles with some understanding.

I’ve been reading popular books on language for fifty years. I’m a reformed prescriptionist because I learned from debunking books where prescriptionism came from and why it’s linguistic nonsense. Plus I’m a writer so studying language is more important to me than quantum mechanics.

From that perspective I have to say that I’m baffled by the OP. The only battle that I’ve seen is actual English usage vs. ignorance. The books I’ve read by Pinker and McWhorter on language seem to be quite sensible explications of how English works. They say pretty much what every other book by a linguist says. And it’s what ordinary readers who don’t regularly read popular linguistics books need to know.

I don’t understand who the enemy is. Better information about English is as valuable as better information about anything. The prescriptivists are irrelevant, obviously, but people who aren’t paying close attention still need to know that.

I see that the author of my university syntax textbook (Andrew Carnie) has a youtube channel where he goes through every chapter explaining each section.

21 hours of: parts of speech, phrase structure rules, syntax trees, binding theory, X-Bar rules, Movement, Thematic Relations, Theta Roles, and MORE!

Its interesting as since the book was written chronologically order (following the development of syntax as a field of study), you get to learn formal generative linguistics as it introduces new topic after new topic, explaining features of language not considered by previous schema.

Side note: It was this bricolage layering of theories that spurned Chomsky to advocate for the Minimalist program which he sees as an attempt to ground any further development of linguistic theory within the scope of how language is used in real world.

I agree with all of this except the one sentence that “The prescriptivists’ proper sphere of activity is, frankly, copy editing.” The mission of trying to get a population more literate and able to speak and write more fluently and with greater style and elegance is a very noble one that goes far beyond copy editing, and I agree with you that it has absolutely nothing to do with linguistics. It’s not a science, it’s an art, and like all art, it seeks to improve our culture and, with it, the human condition. It should be an essential mission of our educational system which is badly failing in promoting literacy.

I’ve said before that prescriptivism and descriptivism are not at all opposite ends of a spectrum, but are in the entirely different domains of art and culture on one hand, and science on the other. They aren’t in conflict.

We all know about science popularizers. Some (like the late Carl Sagan) were a boon to the world. Others, like Richard Lindzen, were counterproductive polemicists. You probably haven’t heard of Lindzen unless you follow climate science, but he’s a now-retired professor of atmospheric science at MIT who was well-credentialed and did good science, but also took to the show-biz circuit and achieved his greatest fame not from his scientific research, but from his contrarian denial of climate science, frequently making claims in his public diatribes undermining climate science that sounded plausible to the layman, but were so absurdly misleading that they could only be characterized as a shameless lies.

I mention all this as background to a question I have about what I quoted.

You mention Steven Pinker and John McWhorter. McWhorter has churned out an enormous number of books and appeared on talk shows, and I can readily accept that he’s the “showman” type, particularly since I disagree with many of his numerous rationalizations about why formal rules of grammar are stupid. His current thesis seems to be that as a linguist, he’s here to authoritatively prove that prescriptivists are always wrong. My view is that as a showman, he’s here to exploit a manufactured controversy for maximum profit.

But do you really want to put Pinker in that same bucket? Pinker does do some of the same stuff, but he’s also a respected multi-disciplinary academic in the fields of psychology and cognitive science as well as linguistics. I agree with you that his The Language Instinct was a good book. And in contrast to McWhorter’s shrieking exhortations about the evils of prescriptivism, Pinker wrote The Sense of Style, about how to write with style and beauty, something that he does extraordinarily well himself.

I’ve read some of McWhorter’s books, though certainly not all, and I don’t remember anything like this. Which of his publications are you referring to?

It’s more like I’m disappointed in him. He got off to a great start but then over the years turned into a crank.

There’s a lot of bullshit in McWhorter’s Words on the Move: Why English Won’t – and Can’t --Sit Still. I’m pretty sure I’ve posted some critiques about it before. It makes many claims that are, at best, unsubstantiated, and in many cases outright wrong.

At any rate, what I was really doing was trying to draw a contrast between McWhorter’s “everything that your teenage kid says is perfect English and should be admired as the advent of the future” versus Pinker’s “here are some guidelines on how to write well”, which presupposes a grasp of standard English.

@Johanna makes the appropriate distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Steven Pinker gets it. I don’t think McWhorter does.

That’s an interesting OP. I guess I had never thought of prescriptivism vs descriptivism being more than a minor, obviously settled point for professionals in the field of linguistics.

Nonetheless, the arguments rage on - not, in my view, because they are relevant to the field of linguistics, but because they are relevant to other professionals: namely, writers and editors.

For me as an editor, it is helpful to be able to frame the debate, if someone dislikes wording I deem acceptable, in terms of prescriptive vs descriptive approaches. And since the latter is correct, I’ll resort to the logical fallacy of appeal to authority if I need to.

That is definitely my impression of him as well. His books remain fascinating, but he can’t help tilting at the windmill of those silly leftists and their Marxist ideas about brains. If he’d just dispense with the hyperbole and strawmen, it’d go a long way toward making him less insufferable.

I teach grammar to my third graders, and I teach them that the science of language is very different from what’s often called grammar, which is much closer to etiquette. One of my favorite things to do is to ask them to use wrong grammar, and then to analyze their sentence. So they’ll pause, think really hard, and say something like, “Me want…that me eat pizza!” and I’ll explain that they used a subject, a verb, and a subordinate clause as a direct object, all following the rules of English grammar.

It’s one of my favorite things to teach.

Well, English can’t sit still and won’t sit still. That’s hardly controversial. If anybody is in any way contesting that reality, they’re the ones who should be loudly yelled at.

I’m not contesting it.

Then I need more context about how and why that book is making “shrieking exhortations about the evils of prescriptivism.” Claims you don’t agree with hardly rise to that level.

I said this too broadly. Probably no one would consider that an error. Perhaps every syntactic innovation (e.g. dropping inflections) was originally considered an error. But real linguists are more interested in understanding the syntactic changes.

Ah, LHOD gets it. You took the words out of my mouth.

Is there a consensus among professionals on where the lines are drawn?

I used goat as an example because that’s a word with a clear origin unrelated to other usages of the word. But for a different less clear example, how about extra? I’m not current on slang but I’m given to understand that extra is now being used to mean behaving in a way that is overly dramatic. This is derived from the traditional meaning of the word. Is this new meaning an example of what linguists would consider a mistake?

No, of course not. I thought we were clear on what a genuine error is. You gave an example of one yourself.

Words expanding their semantic range is pretty mundane everyday stuff. It’s expected to happen. Sometimes a semantic range is narrowed. It’s all quite normal and has always been going on as long as people have spoken language, as far as anyone can tell.

But I’m curious where the line is.

Here’s another example; the use of literally as a general intensifier. People will say things like “I can’t help you move because I’ll be literally tied up all day.” These people generally don’t mean they will have ropes knotted around them holding them in place. They just mean they will be very busy.

In my opinion, this usage qualifies as a mistake. Because if somebody is using words that are normally a metaphor in their non-metaphorical meaning - in other words if somebody was communicating that they were going to be held in place all day by ropes and knots - then the word literally is how you communicate this. By using literally as a general intensifier, we lose its ability to communicate this other meaning.

But is using literally as a general intensifier seen as a mistake?

This seems to me to be an error. Why would “literally” be used to mean “in actuality”? “Literally” seems like it ought to have something to do with words (“He translated the text literally” meaning that he translated word by word, rather than by meaning). Metaphorically, you could understand “literally” to mean that the rest of the sentence should be understood as a word-for-word description of the situation, but that’s an extension of the base meaning, isn’t it?

I’ll tell you where my line is: I will not be drawn into this debate. I started the whole thread in the first place to explain why I’m not getting drawn into it. It’s outside the scope of what I care about, and I believe I speak for most linguistic scientists on this.

Edit: Look, in their profession linguists have to fight really serious battles against nationalistic pseudoscience and obscurantism. (Archaeologists and historians have to deal with the same sorts of challenges.) That’s where our time and energy belong. Standing up for science itself.

Thank you for this thread, by the way. Would it be fair to say that asking a professional linguist about the line between good and bad English usage would be something like asking a sociologist about which fork to use at dinner with the Queen?