Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

Prescriptivism

What?

Prescriptivism is the attitude or belief that one variety of a language is superior to others and should be promoted as such.

This creates a definite right and wrong in language usage. Hence, the language must be used in order to communicate properly.

An advantage of this is it allows all the speakers of that language to clearly communicate with each other. However, the language will no longer allow a development outside of the lexicon in the future, which may create educational and class issues based on those who know the rules and who don’t.

Examples of the rule: Don’t end a sentence with a preposition

                                       Don’t split infinitives

                                       Don’t use the passive voice

                                       Don’t use the pronoun ‘I’ in object position

Who?

• Lynne Truss- wrote a book called ‘Eats shoots and leaves'                                             

• Shadyah A. N. Cole- wrote an article on the historical development of prescriptivism, which shows how social and economic conditions influenced scholarly and popular attitudes to the English language; and Geoffrey Pullum’s ideology, power, and linguistic theory, in which the author assesses justifications for prescriptivist claims, and shows that 'in grammar the 19th century never really went away'.

• David Bentley Hart – wrote about English usage rules                                                       ‘The analytic, lexically antinomian line is that, in themselves, words mean nothing; persons use them as instruments to mean this or that. But, conversely, persons can mean only what they have the words to say, and so the finer our distinctions and more precise our definitions, the more we are able to mean.’

Descriptivism

What?

Descriptivism is a non-judgmental approach to language that focuses on how it is actually spoken and written; documenting and researching a language as it is spoken by native speakers with no judgments as to ‘correct’ forms.  It is the scientific study of language.

Who?

• Steven Pinker

• Henry Hitchings- wrote a book called ‘The English Wars’

• David Crystal – 'Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multi-directional. Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just change.'

Rastamouse Controversy

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/feb/15/rastamouse-cbeebies

Rastamouse: righteous rodent or rank stereotype?

Commentary 

The language issue in this text is represented positively. Throughout the text, we could say the semantic field is popularity; ‘energy’ ‘hero’ ‘fans’ ‘rising’ ‘most-watched’ ‘best’ ‘problem-solving’. All these word classes have optimistic connotations in which may allow the audience to have a positive approach towards ‘Rastamouse’.

The adverb of comment, ‘pleasingly retro feel’ pre-modifies the attributive adjective ‘retro’ for emphasis in which it will allow the audience to feel pleased and satisfied about the programme. The writer has cleverly used the adjective ‘retro’. Nowadays, through the media, retro is seemed to be the growing fashion/trend. Therefore, ‘retro’ catches the audience’s attention and creates the effect of persuading the audience to think that ‘Rastamouse’ is the new, cool trend and everyone should like it as it’s the ‘fashion’.

The proper nouns, ‘Paddington Bear’, ‘Dizzee Rascal’ and ‘Tinie Tempah’ are all famous and well-known names. The writer has created the effect of slowly allowing the audience to like ‘Rastamouse’ and making them assume that this programme is liked and preferred by everyone since the proper nouns mentioned are too.

The writer starts off the text with a triad rhetorical question, ‘righteous rodent or rank stereotype’. The controversy between the evaluative adjectives of ‘righteous’ and ‘rodent or rank’ suggests that as a result of ‘Rastamouse’ having many negative viewpoints from other sources such as The Telegraph and Mirror, the writer could not simply show his opinion straight away since it would not draw the audience’s attention. However, the purpose of writing ‘righteous’ first is that it could be argued to show the writers’ viewpoint; in which ‘Rastamouse’ programme is favoured by the writer. 

Almost ¾ of the text has confident representation about ‘Rastamouse’. There is only a short section on the negatives about the show. The writer has intelligently used statistics to make the audience follow the writers’ viewpoint. The use of factual statistics used, such as complaints from ‘6 viewers’ and ‘95’ complaining about the patois spoken actually encourages the audience to not feel discouraged about the show, but allows audience to not really care about the numbers. The reason being would be that beforehand, the writer has used the large number ‘9000’ fans, creating the effect of ignoring the negative statistics since the positive statistic of ‘9000’ is much larger than ‘6’ and ‘95’.

All of this allows the audience’s response to be in agreement with what the writer is saying.