Ever notice how, as soon as someone learns about cultural relativism, descriptive linguistics, or similar schools of thought, they tend to get all uppity and offended by things like prescriptivism in their own culture?
As an example, consider the descriptivist who starts bitching about a schoolteacher's teaching of grammar because it's prescriptivism. I always smile at this because the descriptivist has missed the point quite badly and considered it best depicted by, for instance, a multicultural society that accepts multiple points of view.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Descriptivism means to objectively describe a language system, and this includes objectively describing its prescriptivist tendencies. Ideally, a descriptivist perspective should explicitly preclude the making of any value judgments about any feature of the system being studied.
As an aside, and admittedly somewhat unrelated to linguistics, it bothers me when so-called adherents to cultural relativism complain about the failure of non-European societies to enforce European concepts of human rights. For those people who complain about Arab women being required to wear headdresses, I can only wonder what they would say about homosexual rites of passage of the Marind-anim people...
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Anonymous2011-03-25 11:45
>>>/b/
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Anonymous2011-03-26 10:49
Discussion of linguistic schools of thought and people's interpretations of them doesn't go on /lang/?
What annoys me is that in most places it's more-or-less okay to say that a language or dialect "sounds unintelligent" or "sounds ugly", while having an opinion that, say, black people look unintelligent or ugly is (rightly) considered heinous.
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Anonymous2011-04-29 18:55
Descriptive linguist who gets uppity about prescriptivism, here.
That's an interesting thought. I don't think it ever occurred to me before.
I suppose you get a kind of recursive nesting with this sort of subject. (Did you notice you're complaining about descriptivists complaining about prescriptivists telling native speakers how to talk?)
By the way, I still think that "outside the lab", as it were, it's not wrong to use descriptive insights to get prescriptive on the prescriptivists' posteriors. Linguistics does TELL us that dialects are not inferior to standardised languages in anything but politics. That insight is no less valid from the fact that descriptivists are supposed to be detached.
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Anonymous2011-04-30 0:44
I'm more of a descriptivist, but of course you'd need to know a certain type of English (or whatever language) because the large majority views is as intelligent, but I do hate prescriptivism. Hurrr don't start sentences with and...
why?
durr because I don't like it
suck a dick faggot
>Descriptivism means to objectively describe a language system, and this includes objectively describing its prescriptivist tendencies.
As a linguist, I just wanted to point out that prescriptive rules are very shallow and uninteresting. Descriptivism, by definition, takes prescriptive rules into account because you are gathering data from real people who are aware of how they talk, and therefore already have some prescriptive rules integrated into their dialect.
However, the field of linguistics as a whole has barely even begun to scratch the surface of describing and being able to explain the deep structure of language. You know, things like answering why it is that in sentences like "John said that he was happy" and "John entered the room, and he was happy," the "he" can refer to "John," but there is not a parallel structure in (otherwise parallel) sentences like "No man said that he was happy," and "No man entered the room, and he was happy." Prescriptive rules say nothing about how to form structures like this, and that's why they are uninteresting to linguists.
>Ideally, a descriptivist perspective should explicitly preclude the making of any value judgments about any feature of the system being studied.
Actually, value judgments are of key importance in descriptive linguistics. Your judgments about language are really all you have to go on when describing your own idiolect (the manifestation of your dialect as it exists uniquely in your brain). It's what tells you that the "he" in "No man entered the room, and he was happy" can not refer to "no man." Without the ability to make these judgments and thereby gather data, you couldn't even start on the task of explaining how your language functions.
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Anonymous2011-05-03 4:31
>>9
>Actually, value judgments are of key importance in descriptive linguistics.
Other people's value judgements, yes - test participants' value judgements, yes - but not your own. Or at least not just your own, and preferably not even mainly your own.
You probably know linguists are actually the least qualified to give grammaticality judgements, because if you spend so much time and attention on construction A, it messes up your intuitions, in the same way that saying the same word over and over again makes it sound weird.
It might even be enough to mess up your intuitions to have any idea of how it works, and to approach it analytically at all. Let alone if you have a hypothesis to be partial to and you're aware that if this sentence is okay, you must be on to something. Try being objective with your judgements then.
I know linguists will informally use their own hunches to weigh whether something sounds right or not, but for any serious conclusions, anyone worth their salt would have the sense to at least double-check it with other people.
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Anonymous2011-05-03 23:18
>>10
Fair enough. I just wanted to point out that descriptive linguistics is as unconcerned with prescriptivism as science is with religion. Science is concerned with explaining the universe, and religion is concerned with helping people find meaning in their otherwise pointless lives.
Similarly, you don't need to think about prescriptive rules until you get into a social situation where you want to prove that you are better than someone else, or otherwise prevent them from proving that they are better than you. Hence people getting help with their lives. Descriptive linguistics is science, meant to explain more basic things, as I pointed out in >>9.
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Anonymous2011-05-04 19:28
>Descriptivism means to objectively describe a language system, and this includes objectively describing its prescriptivist tendencies.
Linguistics describes what people say not what people say what they say.
Prescriptivists are a lot of the times absolutely wrong about what they say they say. Example: Orwell says passives are bad. Yet he himself, who many consider to be a great writer, uses passives much more frequently than the average writer.
Is there not a point in pointing out out-right lies?
>data from real people who are aware of how they talk, and therefore already have some prescriptive rules integrated into their dialect.
>some prescriptive rules integrated into their dialect
What I'm saying is that there are things such as avoidance strategies and hyper-correction that are very real for a lot of people and are very much the result of prescriptivism. People learn not to end sentences in prepositions in school, not at home.
An individual may only avoid ending a sentence in a preposition in their most formal writing, or when speaking to someone they perceive to be an intellectual superior, but the fact that some people do this is a real aspect of their grammars, and descriptive linguistics has to it into account.