Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar PDF

Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar — Have a look at the short article ‘Your Fave Grammar Rule May be Fake’ before the next class. (Will be posted on course site.) ¡ The article discusses the real source of many of these ‘rules’ for English. — Let’s take a look at a couple of these prescriptive...

Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar — Have a look at the short article ‘Your Fave Grammar Rule May be Fake’ before the next class. (Will be posted on course site.) ¡ The article discusses the real source of many of these ‘rules’ for English. — Let’s take a look at a couple of these prescriptive rules that have been proposed for English. Prescriptive Grammar — Example #1: Don’t split infinitives ¡ For example, don’t say: to quickly eat — But… Why? Why can’t infinitives be split? — One reason you might hear is that some prescriptive grammarians think that English should be like Latin, in which infinitives are never “split” Don’t Split Infinitives! 10 Language Infinitive Verb English Gloss Latin Conare To eat Italian Andare To walk Spanish Correr To run French Danser To dance Don’t Split Infinitives! — But infinitives cannot be split in Latin (and other related languages) because they are single words, and single words cannot be interrupted by other words. — And it turns out that sometimes the only grammatical option for including certain expressions in English is to split the infinitive: a) We expect it to more than double. b) *We expect it more than to double. c) *We expect it to double more than. Don’t Split Infinitives! — The rule of not splitting infinitives might make sense for some languages, but not for others. — Trying to make one language pattern like another language ignores the fact that languages can have different rules in their grammars.