Delahunty and Garvey
has the same goals: to allow as many people as possible to communicate ef-
fectively with each other, and to allow people at any time to read texts that
were written perhaps hundreds of years before they were born, much as we
read the novels of Jane Austen now. And standardization allows us to write
texts that will be understood by many generations to come.
The usage rules help ensure that standard English is used in formal writ-
ing and speaking so as to make our writings and speeches clear, efficient,
and effective, given our purposes in communicating and the characteristics
of our audiences. Rules that tell us which forms to choose (saw not seen
or seed as past tense of see), or what syntactic patterns to avoid (multiple
noun modifiers), or to use (parallel structures) are prescriptive. Ideally they
prescribe what are taken to be the most generally used formal writing and
speaking practices at a particular time.
Usage rules are extremely important. Speakers and writers who violate
them are likely to be judged harshly. It is a major part of any teacher’s job to
ensure that students can write in accordance with these rules. They can be
found in composition textbooks, which often devote entire sections to them;
they can also be found in writers’ handbooks of usage rules, in usage dictionar-
ies, or in selected entries in desk dictionaries. Unfortunately, these handbooks
do not always agree with each other and do not always keep up with the ac-
cepted writing practices in important genres. Moreover, the conventions differ
from one discipline to another.
However, for teachers to be able to teach the usage rules, they must un-
derstand the concepts that underlie them and the terminology in which
they are expressed. For example, they must know what nouns are, be able
to recognize them in texts and to produce examples of them on demand;
what “past tense” means and how it is formed; what “agreement” means and
how it is expressed; which structures are parallel and which are not; and
what participles are so that they will be able to recognize them when they
“dangle,” or to teach them in order to expand the range of structures their
students can use in their writing. And they must be aware of current usage
controversies.
You may know about some of these things. For example, you may know
about the traditional parts of speech, about subjects and predicates, about
direct and indirect objects. In this book we will develop all these and re-
lated ideas by making use of the findings of modern linguistic and discourse
studies. Our point of view will be descriptive rather than prescriptive. That
is, rather than prescribing how someone thinks the language should be, we
will attempt to describe as objectively as we can as much of modern stan-
dard English as space allows. Our descriptive stance is that of linguistics in