Well, I have already written about prescriptivism at length before. I was really settled in letting the issue go but something caught my eye just this weekend. For some reason, I keep getting a weekly spam from the Jose Carillo English Forum. (Jose Carillo, as some might know, is an award-winning author of books that prescribe “correct English.”) In his advisory, he pits descriptivism against prescriptivism by comparing one of my favorite linguists, David Crystal with Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves fame. You can find a lengthy post about it on his blog here.

Now for as a scholar of English language studies, there are a few things in the post that made me pause, back track, and read through the piece again.

Top of mind, I am quite uncomfortable with the representatives he picked for the conflicting schools of thought. David Crystal is one of the key figures in linguistics for the past couple of decades and authored many of the important books in the study of English linguistics. Lynne Truss is a writer and a journalist by trade (though graduated with a degree in English Language and Literature) who, as far as I know, has never penned any major work in linguistics. But this point is trivial (and a bit biased since Crystal is an inspiration to my current research) compared to what is probably a major oversight from Mr. Carillo in his piece.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Being a science, its aim is not to dictate how things should be but to explain the state of things. I might be quoting some other linguist with that line but that’s common knowledge among linguists of today. John McWhorter, in his course for The Teaching Company, even emphasized that it is not linguistics’ role to police grammar.

While I am not saying that there is no room for prescription in this world (as there are instances in language teaching where prescription will aid the learner), what I’m saying is that, as far as linguistics-as-a-science goes, I think it is questionable to claim that the current state of linguistics is characterized by the conflict between these “two major opposing camps.” Linguistics has branched out into many other subfields and across disciplines to appear to be stymied by this debate. While, discussions regarding this schism might still continue in some circles, particularly in language teaching approaches, by virtue of linguistics being a science, any scholarly work in the field is primarily descriptive.

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Oh, a minor site announcement, I’ve finally taken down my blog in English and moved all discussions to the online community I’ve created with some of the young turks in the department. Shameless plug: Please visit and register at The English Studies Forum.

Check out these other posts:

1. Another take on prescriptivism
2. On English, prescriptivism, Filipinos, and the Internet
3. Computational linguistics in the Philippines, anyone?
4. What’s this? Syntactic Structures free for download?
5. A new blog for learning English language and literature