Chapter three in the book: Grammar for Grammarians outlines different Prescriptive Rules. These rules were developed during the 18th century and many of them are still used to this day. This blog will contain a summary of the second half of the chapter: pages 48-60 and will contain these Prescriptive Rules: “Parallelism, Latin Grammar is an Appropriate Model for English, Different Forms Imply Different Meanings, Language Change Represents Decay, and Language is “Logical.”
Parallelism in a rule in Grammar that is thought to date back to “Murray” and it “requires that items in a series be of the same grammatical form.” A few examples the book gives to help understand this rule are: “If he prefer a virtuous life, and is sincere in his professions, he will succeed;” “if he prefers.” “The parliament addresses the king, and has been prorogued the same day;” “and was prorogues.”
Latin Grammar is an Appropriate Model for English- At this point in the chapter the authors bring up the point that a lot of English’s rules are based on the rules of other languages such as Latin. (E.g. the rule of not being able to end a sentence with a preposition) The problems that come from this are:
- Latin is an Italic language and English is a Germanic one.
-Latin is a “synthetic “language with many inflections and English is “analytic” with few inflections.
-Latin is a language where the direct object normally precedes the verb and in English the direct object normally follows the verb.
These differences make both languages not able to be considered a “direct transfer language.”
The next subject the book covers is “Different Forms Imply Different Meanings.” In this section the reader learns that English is a language that has many interchangeable words such as “shall” and “will.” In most languages words can’t be interchangeable and rules are made when and what word to use. Some would use “shall” only for “first-person and “will” would be used for “second and third-persons.” Some people argue that there is always one word or way of saying something that is “superior” to the other.
When languages are changed the authors say the reason is because it has become “decayed.” This rule comes from people thinking that past versions are better, but as time goes on everyone makes small gradual changes to languages and this apparently “normal” as the author states. The best example is to think how English has been changed over the years. 1000 years ago people spoke Old English and we see this in texts such as, Beowulf. Then we evolved to Middle English which is the language that Chaucer developed in his writings. We slowly made our way to Early Modern English which is what a lot of Shakespeare’s writings are in. At this point, English is thought to be known as Modern English, but this doesn’t mean that our language won’t gradually change again and again until the end of time.
During the last section of this chapter readers learn that Language is “logical” because “it is a self-contained, rule-governed system.” The author wants us to keep in mind though that English and all languages can never be thought of as “common sense.” There are many rules that have to be learned by all and take a big part of memorization of rules that go into that language. Interpretation is another thing that makes languages not able to be “common sense” because many see things in different ways and there are many words in English alone that can be interpretive differently.
Prescriptive grammar is a set of rules that make things “correct” or “not-correct” and “actual language use various grades of acceptability.”
