Grammar: Prescriptive vs Descriptive Flashcards
What is grammar?
the structural rules governing a language’s syntax, morphology, and phonology
Linguists believe grammar has two parts:
grammar and lexicon
Non-linguists use the term grammar to include things like
spelling and punctuation
Traditional grammar has origins in
Latin and Ancient Greek
Parts of speech
nouns, articles, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions
Noun
used to refer to people, objects, creatures, places, qualities, phenomena, and abstract ideas
Articles
used with nouns to classify those ‘things’
Adjectives
give more info about nouns
Verbs
used to refer to actions and states
Adverbs
used typically with verbs to provide more info
Prepositions
used typically with nouns to provide more info about time, place, or other connections
Pronouns
used in place of noun phrases
Conjunctions
used to make connections and indicate relationships between events
Other parts of speech can include
interjections, numerals, postpositions
Brainerd Kellogg created a way to
diagram a sentence
Prescriptivism
holds that some varieties are better than others, most dictionaries and grammar guides are prescriptive, they identify and reinforce standard rules
Descriptivism
an approach that most linguists take to language, linguists have a mission to describe real language
Prescriptive rules come from
Latin and Greek
Written language often
preserves linguistic forms that have died out in normal spoken language
Facet of language
Phonology, morphology, syntax
Phonology
sound system, phonemes (speech sounds) of a language and the rules regarding them
Morphology
morphemes are the smallest units in a language that have meaning, usually are individual words but suffixes and prefixes are also examples of morphemes
Syntax
word order within sentences and clauses
How do linguists mark ungrammatical utterances
with an asterisk
