释义 |
prescriptivism|prɪˈskrɪptɪvɪz(ə)m| [f. prescriptive a. + -ism.] 1. Linguistics. The practice or advocacy of prescriptive grammar; the belief that the grammar of a language should lay down rules to which usage must conform.
1954College English XV. 395/1 Professor Bloomfield comes to the conclusion that what is taught in an English class must be some form of..prescriptivism, checked by the limits of fact as established by linguistics. Ibid. 395/2 Bloomfield defends prescriptivism first because it has social utility. That is, the public judges..our students by the language they use. 1957Eng. Lang. Teaching XII. i. 10 It is not for their prescriptivism as such that the older teaching grammars stand condemned. 1964Word XX. 289 The charge of prescriptivism is also made against Chomsky. 1971Archivum Linguisticum II. 54 We are probably all aware of the operation of even weaker collocational constraints as we search for the ‘right’ choice among, say, achieve, accomplish, effect,..etc. to associate with plan or project or proposal.., and a certain inescapable ‘prescriptivism’ informing language choices is perhaps worthy of note in passing. 1976Amer. Speech 1973 XLVIII. 264 Prescriptivism is wrong, the reader is told again. 2. Philos. The theory that (moral) judgements have prescriptive force akin to that of imperatives; freq. contrasted with descriptivism 1.
1963R. M. Hare Freedom & Reason ii. 16 Let me refer to the type of doctrine..as ‘universal prescriptivism’. 1963I. L. Horowitz Power, Politics & People 15 His [sc. Mills's] role in sociology as a contributor to its debates on descriptivism and prescriptivism. 1967Encycl. Philos. II. 317/2 There are two main varieties of prescriptivism. The nominalist variety explains definitions as semantic rules for assigning names to objects, while the formalist variety regards definitions as syntactic rules for abbreviating strings of symbols. 1973Heythrop Jrnl. XIV. 136 (title) Prescriptivism in theory and practice. 1976T. D. Perry Moral Reasoning & Truth i. 33 Moore's famous doctrine of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ which has been accepted in principle by three of the four major tendencies in analytical ethics: intuitionism, emotivism, prescriptivism. |