Adherents to descriptive linguistics

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...

>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.