Johanna,
    I was using descriptive and prescriptive in a much more "popular way",
as it plays out, for example, with dictionary entries that don't
describe a common use as "wrong." When everyday words become part of
the technical debate within a discipline, it is important to get them
right.  But I wonder if something isn't being lost by classifying all
these approaches as descriptive when there are so many differences
between them. Even "explanation" seems to leave us short of practical
"advice" about use, which is what most people want out of language
study.  I know lots of people who have taken generative grammar
courses and found them totally impractical.  They can describe the
rule driven nature of the forms, but they have no way to put that into
practice in interpretation or revision of text.  A "Descriptive
discourse linguistics" would have to take so much more into
consideration than just the forms of the isolated sentences, so maybe
that's the answer; but that's also moving away from what we normally
think of as "descriptive".  "Explanation" seems to fit much better.
    You can describe traditional biology and ecology as both
"descriptive", but I think that might obscure important differences.
Ecology tends to be far more value laden, and I think language study
needs to acknowledge that as well. Ecology is also far more systemic,
perhaps in the way a discourse linguistics needs to be.  A change in
one part of the system influences everything else around it.
    I like your observation that prescriptive grammar seems to give people
advice, but that the advice is often wrong, and it is something we can
understand as wrong from a more scientific (detached) perspective. But
it certainly lives on, with all its terrible flaws, in large part
because there has been nothing to replace it with.
    I don't like using the term "functional" because it sounds to many
people like taking sides in a tired old debate, but the only way to
get around the "correct" and "incorrect" narrowness (and
disfunctionality) of prescriptive approaches to discourse, including
grammar, is to come up with a functional model. It is an "explanation"
of how things work, but I don't think we can avoid values within the
system. We need to find texts that are models of effectiveness, for
example, before we can decide what makes a text effective, and we need
to think about certain kinds of "work" that can and should be done and
ask ourselves what kinds of language choices further that work. The
advertiser may be interested in what it takes to sell his/her brand of
beer, and we may be interested in what it takes to make that campaign
fail. The advertiser wants a science of manipulation, and the teacher
wants a science of enlightenment or awareness. The school system
certainly has a vested interest in producing better citizens, but that
may also be a continuation of a status quo that we might want to
challenge or change.
    Do we want our students to behave "correctly"?  Can we describe the
ways in which they fall short of that mark?  Most conversations about
grammar take shape around that narrow focus.
    If we want our students to use language effectively, do we mean in our
interests or in theirs?  Whose interest is being served when surface
features of language typical of a certain group are used, quite
literally,  as a means of discrimination?
    Current practice seems to penalize people for how they behave without
deepening what they know.
     Those of us in the middle of the public debate about this don't need
to hold to the perspective within one of the contributing fields.
It's a very tough problem precisely because so many people bring
their own perspectives to it, and these people do NOT have a history
of cooperation.  Because linguistics needs to be a somewhat detached
science, we may need to use its insights in ways that may seem
foreign to the field.
    How do we give advice to language users?  By its nature, it's not a
descriptive question.
    The answers I would give are less directive, more empowering than the
current way of doing things. I would certainly like to see the
pendulum swing back to far more conscious awareness of language, a
deeper sense of the wide options available.  When I work with a
student in REVISING an ongoing draft, I certainly want to feel that
the student owns the paper and suggestions are more like explorations
of possibilities that the student might not see on his or her own.
Unless I want to dictate what the writer means, I can't call one
better than another. Until the student can be articulate about
purposes, I have to ask questions rather than give answers. We need to
recognize ways in which this sort of decision making relates sentence
level adjustments to the work of the whole text.
    Somehow, I don't want to discount describing as enormously important,
but I'm not sure it can ever get us all the way home. When we stretch
it too far, it stops meaning what most people understand by it. (As my
favorite undergraduate teacher would say, "you are making a linguistic
proposal.")
    With apologies for trying to work through my thoughts rather than
present them as done. (Is that an OK fragment?) I hope it comes across
as more than rambling.

Craig

Craig,
>
> "Describing" is exactly what you are talking about. Descriptive
> discourse linguistics describes HOW speakers and writers achieve
> coherence, information flow, and all that important stuff by noting
> which forms are consistently used to accomplish these objectives. There
> are many sorts of descriptive linguistics: structuralism was one,
> generative linguistics as founded by Chomsky is one, cognitive
> linguistics is one, and discourse analysis is one, as are systemics and
> Dutch-style functionalism.
>
> An ongoing debate within linguistics is description vs. explanation.
> The ultimate goal of linguistic theory is to do both. I am, perhaps,
> glossing over the explanatory qualities of cognitive and discourse
> linguistics. There is a strong explanatory element. One tiny example is
> the principle of iconicity I mentioned in my last post. Humans respond
> well when a form can be perceived as similar to or mimicking a
> function. Hence the tendency in every language to put modifiers inside
> constituent phrases with their heads. A computer can easily be
> programmed to interpret the following:
>
> 1. Bring me the shirt, pants, tie, jacket, and socks blue, cream,
> paisley, dark blue, white.
>
> As
>
> 2. Bring me the white shirt, dark blue pants, paisley tie, cream
> jacket, and blue socks.
>
> All you have to do is program the computer to assign the words after
> the last noun to the nouns in reverse order. Humans have not invented
> syntax of the type in 1. because our brains do not do as well with that
> kind of processing as they do with iconic structure. The color of an
> item is an intimate part of that item, so putting the words for the
> item and its color close together easily symbolizes the relation.
>
> What you want is explanation, and that's the term I should be using.
> Prescriptive grammar does provide some explanations -- iconicity and
> ambiguity avoidance are good reasons to avoid misplaced modifiers. But
> they don't go as deep into the reasons for a rule. Unfortunately, many
> of their explanations are unsound (such as illogic and double
> negatives), and some rules have no explanation from within the language
> (split infinitive prohibition).
>
> Descriptive linguistics (with the explanations it provides) CAN win. As
> to fragments, there are easy explanations. But I have something to do,
> so maybe I can give those another time.
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
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