the linguist’s term, ‘preposition stranding’, which implies that the preposition belongs before its object. The ‘normal’ structure is the prescribed one; anywhere else and it has been left stranded. Stranding is what Bernard Williams (1985) termed a ‘thick concept’, one that is substantially descriptive while also expressing a specific evaluation. Water is a ‘thin’ descriptive concept, good is a thin evaluative concept, but dogmatic and courageous are thick concepts. Prescriptivists operate with thin evaluative concepts like correct and inelegant, which lead linguists, with our binaristic instincts, to presume that we, as descriptivists, use their exact opposites, namely, thin descriptive concepts. And so we mostly do: fricative, adverb, interrogative and the like are descriptive in the way that water is.5 However, much of our analytical apparatus is ‘thick’ in Williams’ sense. This includes the terms prescriptive and descriptive themselves, of which the Oxford English Dictionary’s two earliest citations in the linguistic context are these, from a Dane and a Czech, as it happens:
1933 O. Jespersen Essent. Eng. Gram. i. 19 Of greater value, however, than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar.
1948 I. Poldauf On Hist. Probl. Eng. Gram. 118 Prescriptivism is the form of authoritarianism characteristic of the English, not Scottish, grammarians of the latter half of the 18th century.
Note the invocation of value and purely by Otto Jespersen (1933), and Ivan Poldauf’s (1948) judgementally loaded equating of prescriptivism with authoritarianism.
It is not easy to get most linguists to accept that the metaphorical connotations of stranding imply a judgement about what is the ‘normal’ position of a preposition. The term preposition itself contains this ‘judgement’ in the pre-, yet this is a simple observation of the fact that English speakers say I did it for them and not I did it them for. The same speakers will usually and quite ‘naturally’ ask Who did you do it for?, unless they have had it beaten into them by prescriptivist teachers that this is wrong precisely because for is a preposition. They are taught that the correct English must be For whom did you do it?, which sounds stilted and artificial to most people, indeed, even to some prescriptivists who nevertheless use this form because it is deemed correct. Linguists have come up with a second thick term, ‘pied-piping’, for sentences such as For whom did you do it? or Ask not for whom the bell tolls; the for has been ‘pied-piped’ from its ‘normal’ position after the verb, where it is placed in deep structure, according to the analysis of John Robert Ross (1967), who coined the term. In Ross’s humorously intended reference, the Pied Piper of Hamelin is the prescriptive grammarian who lures the for out of its natural place. Whether we call for whom the bell tolls pied-piping, or call who the bell tolls for preposition stranding, our largely descriptive term implies an evaluative element, a value judgement about where the for really belongs.
Proposition 2: It is Unclear whether Pure Descriptivism is Possible
The formulation of Hume’s Law, also known as Hume’s Guillotine, was a polarizing moment in modern thought. It concerns how is statements shade into ought ones – how statements that on the surface appear not to make a moral judgement subtly do just that. In his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume (1711–1776) remarks on how an
author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and […] makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. (Hume, 1738–1740: Part I, Section 1)
For an example, we need look no further than this very passage. It is superficially an observation, but with a prescriptive moral stance concerning the use of language, signalled first by ‘of a sudden, I am surpriz’d’. The ‘thick’ word imperceptible connotes deception, slipping in its moral judgement like an ace from the card dealer’s sleeve. Hume’s Law is itself an ‘ought’ statement cast in ‘is’ form. He absolves himself by following up with an overt rationale:
For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it […]. (Hume, 1738–1740: Part I, Section 1)
Providing the reason for the moral judgement is the ‘guillotine’ that would cleanly sever is from ought. A question: Is linguistic prescriptivism inherently a form of moral judgement? Anti-prescriptivists say it is, and I would agree. Whether or not it is expressed in a way that overtly castigates rule breakers in moral terms such as ignorant, lax or sinful, any prescribing of a behavioural norm that identifies some action as better or more correct or logical or authentic or normal than another is implicitly ‘moral’. If you choose to dispute that, I will adduce etymological evidence about the word moral in an attempt to make my prescription trump yours. All these count as values, and values are always potentially moral, while prescriptions are inherently so. But being moral does not make them intrinsically illogical or oppressive.
The reverse is also true: moral judgements, and value judgements, are implicitly prescriptive.6 I am not talking about the intent of whoever makes them; that is ultimately indeterminable. If I ask the person directly, I cannot know whether their response is honest, or even if they fully know their own intent. The best I can do is draw inferences based on my own experiences of making value judgements; yet I know that individuals differ. When I call value judgements implicitly prescriptive, I again mean potentially so, in how they are interpreted by those who hear or read them. As Albert Marckwardt pointed out in an article discussing the controversy over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), ‘An accurate description of the language as it is actually used […] will in itself serve prescriptive purposes’ (Marckwardt, 1963: 337–338).
Although linguists have long asserted descriptivism as a foundational value, what linguists mostly describe are socially shared systems. A few speakers are taken as representative of all. Their observed usage is generally reduced to what is normal, with any eccentricities put into a waste bin of performance errors or idiosyncrasies or are otherwise explained away. Here already is has shaded into ought. Even if just one speaker’s language is being described, how was that speaker chosen? Perhaps she is the last surviving speaker, but in that case, she will inevitably be bilingual, and the linguist will have choices to make about how to handle or ignore the other language which she must use most of the time.
With regard to generative linguistics and its ‘ungrammatical’ sentences that native speakers reject as not part of the language at all, here is another OED citation:
1964 Word 20 289 The charge of prescriptivism is also made against Chomsky.7
Surely that charge will not stick, will it? Chomsky has always been adamant that ‘ungrammatical’ for him is not a value judgement, as it is for prescriptivists who apply it to things speakers regularly say and write but authorities frown upon. Has he not for decades waved the flag for children’s ‘infinite linguistic creativity’ in producing and understanding utterances that they have never heard before? Yet listen to him in 1958, in a debate with Anna Granville Hatcher (1905–1978), a corpus linguist avant la lettre:
| Chomsky: | The trouble with using a corpus is that some authors do not write the English language. Veblen, for example, speaks of ‘performing leisure’, and the verb perform cannot take such an object. |
| Hatcher: | I admit it sounds unusual. But I bet that if you studied the verb perform you would find other expressions not too far from this, pointing the way to this. He has gone farther perhaps along a certain road but I do not believe he has created something new. |
| Chomsky: |
No. He has
|
