| descriptivism |
| Definition:
Practicing or advocating descriptive linguistics, i.e., the belief that the linguist's proper role is to observe and describe language behaviors, rather than to prescribe how people should speak. Note: Those who describe are called descriptivists, whereas those who prescribe are called prescriptivists. |
| Example: I don't know whether you should end a sentence with a preposition. |
| Oxford English Dictionary: The word's first citation is its definition in the 1961 edition of the Webster's New International Dictionary. (Webster's New International Dictionary) |
| Quotation:
"One of the most striking features of American descriptivism in the 1940s was its insistence on justification in terms of precisely specified procedures of analysis."
(Source: Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics (1966), page 106 ) |