Prescription and Description
Linguistic prescription is typically contrasted with the alternative approach linguistic description. Linguistic description (observation and explanation of how language exists and is used) establishes conceptual categories without establishing formal usage rules (prescriptions). About normative rules, the introduction to the Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) reports that: “Possible is sometimes considered to be an absolute adjective”.
In 1572 the fundation of the Accademia della Crusca set the model for future purist and prescriptivist institutions in Europe. It was met with the opposition of Cesare Beccaria and the Verri brothers (Pietro and Alessandro), which through their journal Il Caffè programmatically insulted the Accademia and its pedantic, archaic grammar in the name of Galileo and Newton and of a modern and cosmopolitan intellectual thought. Another typical criticism directed toward prescriptivism is verbosity. The discipline of modern linguistics originated in the 16th and 17th centuries from the comparative method of lexicography that was principally about classical languages, the results of which formed the bases, in the 18th and 19th centuries, of contemporary linguistics; by the early 20th century, descriptive research concentrated upon modern languages.
Despite the demotic intent of General American and Non-regional Pronunciation Englishes as “standard language”, upon being established as such, they are prescriptively exclusive of other Anglophone languages such as Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, and AAVE.
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Famous quotes containing the words prescription and/or description:
“Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others—first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one’s own interests and desires. Carried to its “perfection,” it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)