linguistics1-1 Exercise 3: Descriptive or Prescriptive? ======================================================== (a) "English speakers say I haven't got any or I haven't any" DESCRIPTIVE. It reports what speakers do and makes no judgement about whether they ought to. (b) "You must never begin a sentence with and" PRESCRIPTIVE. It tells people what they should or should not do. It is also a rule that careful writers break all the time, and it is not part of English grammar in the descriptive sense: speakers and writers produce sentences that begin with and without any difficulty. (c) *Dog the barked loudly UNGRAMMATICAL (*). No native speaker produces this word order, because English places the article before the noun (the dog). A prescriptive grammarian does not need to object to it, because nobody says it. (d) I ain't seen nothing GRAMMATICAL in the descriptive sense, but disapproved of by prescriptivists. It follows consistent rules of a non-standard variety (negative concord, in which negation is marked on more than one word, as in French "je n'ai rien vu" and many other languages). The disapproval is social, not structural. Chapter 9 returns to this. The key distinction: "ungrammatical" in linguistics means that native speakers do not produce a sentence and reject it. "Wrong" in the everyday sense often means only that some people disapprove of it.