descriptivist

Rebecca Wheeler, the professor at Christopher Newport University mentioned at the outset, is a descriptivist, like all linguists.

In not once place on this long page of comments do I see the usual descriptivist lament.

This is the old prescriptivist vs descriptivist debate, as seen among linguists.

I generally try to take a descriptivist approach to language usage, but this one makes me cringe a little every time.

Normally I really don't care -- apostrophe use is confusing; my grammar is lousy; I tend to be descriptivist not prescriptivist, etc.

If you don't want to seem like an idiot, then don't write like an idiot just because recent descriptivist dictionaries were pleased to take note of the increasingly widespread misuse.

I understand the compulsion for people with knowledge of linguistics to wield their descriptivist stick at any and every opportunity, but your complaint is completely irrelevant here.

Then you supply a reference to a dictionary that is using a descriptivist definition of a modern use of the word which is clearly derived from the long established definition of slave.

After years of being mocked as a pedant for avoiding the word (ok, there may have been other reasons), I decided to dip a toe in the descriptivist waters.

Myselfs` experience has been that even descriptivist`s have a braking point,they`res always something that make`s them cry,,, `stop!`, even when its' clear enough what is meaned!!!

The GoF design patterns book is an excellent descriptivist treatise, but then people started treating it like a cookbook and looked for reasons to implement Patterns everywhere, rather than extracting the patterns from their code.

What I'm getting at here is that this idea of Mandela's also applies to samewise monolingual speakers — as we each have our own idiolect, so far as descriptivist linguists are concerned.

"She is a descriptivist, like all linguists." Is that statement descriptivist or prescriptivist?

You're not wrong (though not entirely right, because descriptivist linguistics ): An intuitive code governs..." Is there a name for this?

In terms you use, what are the rules which describe what "other people will naturally agree with." In case you couldn't tell, I'm a descriptivist, in the Language-Log-fanboi sort of way.

> Actual linguists and lexicographers who answer to the "descriptivist" label tend to be quite concerned with precisely those matters Bloom claims that they neglect.