Name: Generative Syntax 1.1: Prescriptive and Descriptive Rules
Uploaded: 2016-10-11T14:45:21.000Z
Duration: 17 min 50 s
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We should begin by saying what this course is about. What we’ll be looking at is syntactic

theory. That is to say, we’ll be looking at the kinds of rules that determine how words

Basic passive voice

and language are put together to form larger units that have meaning and how speakers of

a language are able to determine what are possible and what are impossible orders of

So the first thing we might want to ask ourselves then is what is it that people know when they

know the syntax of their language. One possible answer, the kind of answer that a prescriptive

grammarian would give, is that what speakers know when they know the syntax of their language

is that they know what rules they should follow in order to produce good sentences. That is

to say, they know the rules of “good grammar”. There are various different examples that

one could give in English for what are considered rules of this kind. A famous one is the rule

that says that you shouldn’t split infinitives. That is to say, you shouldn’t say “He

decided to quickly leave the room”; you should rather say “He decided quickly to

leave the room.” So that rule that says you shouldn’t split infinitives would be

one kind of prescriptive rule, and a prescriptive grammarian would say that that’s what you

know when you know the syntax of English. That’s one of the rules that you know.

There are other rules of that type. Uhm, one example would be that you shouldn’t end

a sentence with a preposition. Or there are complex rules surrounding when you should

use “I” or “me” in coordinations. So, uhm, “My sister and I went to the shops.

She gave it to my sister and I. Or she gave it to me and my sister. Or she gave it to

There are various prescriptive rules about which of those is correct and which of them

is incorrect. Rules like this, which are often called prescriptive rules because they prescribe

what you should do (they tell you what you should do) are often learned consciously and

taught consciously, even to native speakers of the language. And that’s very different

from the way language is generally acquired. The vast bulk of what native speakers know

about their language they don’t know explicitly and it wasn’t taught to them explicitly.

So this would make these rules an exception rather than the general case of the kind of

knowledge that speakers have of their language.

But there is a very different understanding of what rules of the language are, what syntactic

rules are. And to understand this, we could think, perhaps, of a more common contrast,

and that is the two different ways that we understand the concept of law. Law and rule

are intrinsically related concepts. And we can talk about laws of the country, laws of

a region, but on the other hand we also talk about laws of nature. And it’s pretty clear

that those two things are rather different concepts.

In every country there are thousands of laws proscribing certain types of behaviour. In

the UK, as in many other countries, there is clearly a law that says you are not allowed

to kill a human being. There are many other laws covering all sorts of kinds of behaviour.

On the other hand, we know that such laws are regularly disobeyed. As a result of that,

we also have to include punishments for people who violate these laws. So this is the way

that the normal… a normal understanding of laws of society. And we can think of linguistic

prescriptive rules as being of the same type.

Unlike with other laws, there is often no particular body that has authority to decide

what is or is not “good” in the language. But we may nevertheless recognise informal

authorities. And in fact in some countries there are specific formal authorities who

get to codify what is considered correct or incorrect in linguistic behaviour.

It’s worth noticing that one way in which these kinds of prescriptive rules of language

are similar to laws of society is that indeed they’re disobeyed all of the time. That

is to say, people don’t respect these prescriptive rules and indeed they have in common, these

prescriptive rules of the language have in common with societal laws that knowing what

they are is actually a very guide to what people actually do.

So, in a society, we don’t generally pass laws to outlaw behaviour that doesn’t exist.

Nobody bothers writing laws to rule out behaviours that people don’t actually indulge in. So

if you study another society, it’s actually quite instructive to look at the laws that

they have to find out what people were doing as well as what people didn’t want them

In the same way, when you find a prescriptive rule of language, it’s usually a very good

guide to the fact that speakers of that language do produce that behaviour. They use that structure,

which we’re told is not “good”. These prescriptive rules of language often in fact

arise when in a given language there’s more than one way to express a certain thought,

when there’s variation in how something can be said. And then there’s a tendency

for one of those ways of saying things to be viewed as more “correct” than the other,

and this can become codified as a rule of the language, as a prescriptive norm.

Quite often, but not always, that prescriptive norm is an older form of the language, that

is, it’s been in the language longer, and there is a tendency to want to keep language

in its original form, although that’s not what ever actually happens.

But that’s not the only possibility, but it’s certainly one of them. So, there’s

the view that whenever you have variation, that one form is correct and the others are

incorrect. So that’s a typical pattern for a prescriptive rule of language.

On the other hand, there’s a very different take on law and rule, so there’s this different

understanding of what a law means. As we said, there are laws of society, but we also talk

about laws of nature, laws of physics. These laws are not rules about how nature should

behave, how the universe should behave. They’re observations about regularities in the universe,

so in some aspect of the universe. And, when we think about language too, we can think

about rules of that kind. That is, rules that are not ways in which people should behave,

but observations about patterns of behaviour. A descriptive grammarian looks at language

in exactly this way. And a descriptive grammarian is interested in observing the regularities

in a particular aspect of the world around them, in this case the regularities in the

linguistic behaviour of a group of people. What such a descriptive grammarian (but for

now let us call them a linguist) does is to observe the behaviour of an individual or

a group of individuals, and to try to observe and to derive from these observations generalisations

about the way these people are behaving and to induce from those observations the most

succinct statements of these regularities.

One way of doing this is to look at collections of behaviour, that is to say, to look at corpora

of speech or of written language, and to look within these corpora for regularities. And

that is certainly a very valid way of doing linguistics, and a lot of useful work is being

done in that way and continues to be done in that way.

But it’s also important to realise that we need to know about language not only what

speakers do, but what they don’t do. And not only that, but there are other kinds of

linguistic behaviour apart from producing speech and producing writing.

So one ability that users of language have is they are able to look at or consider strings

of words, sequences of words, and they’ll have an opinion as to whether that sequence

of words is possible in their language or not possible. And that kind of judgement,

which is also a kind of linguistic behaviour, is a very good source of data about regularities

in human language, about possible descriptive rules of human language.

So, to give one example, you can take a very simple sentence like “Anna read a book”

and a very slightly more complicated one like “Anna read a book and a newspaper”. If

you want to make a question, we can make a question out of “Anna read a book”: we

want to know, well, what did she read… perhaps you didn’t hear the question properly. The

corresponding question would be “Which book did Anna read?”.

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Generative Syntax 1.1: Prescriptive and Descriptive Rules

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