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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 22
grammar: it prescribes the correct form (and proscribes forms it considers
‘wrong’). Prescriptive grammar has two typical features:
1. It presents an oversimplification: a particular form is right or wrong.
2. It considers a very small part of the grammatical structure of English
(or any other language with a similar prescriptive tradition); in (4e) it
might comment on the use of as, but would ignore the fact that the
word this agrees with the woman in being singular, or that the verb speak
requires a preposition to, or that the implicit meaning here is that ‘I
spoke to you about the woman.’
The result of prescriptive grammar is that although all of the forms in (2) are
heard from real speakers, the standard, formal, written language has less variation
available within it than spoken English. (2e) sounds perfectly normal to
many people, particularly in Scotland, but it is probably not part of standard,
formal, written English.
Models of grammar
The alternative to prescriptive grammar is descriptive grammar, the study of
language structures in order to describe them thoroughly rather than in order
to tell someone else what they should be saying. The line between the two is
probably less secure than this might imply: many a descriptive grammarian has
seen their work used (or abused) by prescriptivists. The difference between
saying that a certain class of people tend to say x and saying that you should say
x is a thin one.
Descriptive grammarians (or descriptive linguists; the two are synonymous)
attempt not only to describe a particular language or a set of languages, but to
explain why they should be the way they are. They often have a theoretical
structure, a model of grammar, which they are testing against particular data
from a given language. Many of the names of these models contain the word
grammar: case grammar, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, functional
grammar, phrase-structure grammar, role and reference grammar, scale and
category grammar, transformational grammar, word grammar and so on.
Perhaps the major difference between ideas of grammar in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and later ones is the introduction of the idea of a
generative grammar.
Generative grammar
The notion of a generative grammar was made central in linguistics by
Chomsky in his book Syntactic Structures (1957). According to Chomsky,