prescriptive (adj.)

A term used by LINGUISTS to characterize any approach which attempts to lay down RULES of CORRECTNESS as to how LANGUAGE should be used. Using such criteria as purity, logic, history or literary excellence, prescriptivism aims to preserve imagined standards by insisting on NORMS of USAGE and criticizing departures from these norms. Prescriptive grammars of English include such recommendations as: I should be used after the VERB be, e.g. It is I; whom should be used as the RELATIVE PRONOUN in OBJECT FUNCTION, e.g. the man whom I saw; and so on. A distinction is sometimes made between prescriptive and PROSCRIPTIVE rules, the latter being rules which forbid rather than command. Linguistics has been generally critical of the prescriptivist approach, emphasizing instead the importance of DESCRIPTIVELY accurate studies of usage, and of the need to take into account SOCIOLINGUISTIC variation in explaining attitudes to language. More recently, there has been interest in studying prescriptivism objectively, as a sociocultural phenomenon. The term ‘prescriptive’ is sometimes used in sociolinguistics (e.g. the prescriptions of a sociolinguistically realistic language-planning programme), but on the whole the term is pejorative in linguistic contexts.