Prescriptive approaches to language, concerned with how the prescriptivist recommends language should be used, are often contrasted with the alternative approach of descriptive linguistics, which observes and records how language actually is used.

A dangling modifier ( a specific case of which is the dangling participle ) is an ambiguous grammatical construct, often considered an error in prescriptivist accounts of English, whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended, or with no particular word at all.

That an English clause should not end with a preposition – that a preposition should not be " stranded " – was a " rule " long propounded by prescriptivist grammarians.

An extreme prescriptivist might maintain that even if every sentence in current English uses a certain construction, that construction may still be incorrect.

This usage has been presented as compulsory by some prescriptivist grammarians of British English.

While, from a linguistic prescriptivist perspective, any dictionary might be believed to dictate correct usage, linguists recognize that looking up words in dictionaries is not itself a rule-following practice independent of the give-and-take of using words in context.

For an illustrative example of the prescriptivist stance, consider the moral sentence " Murder is wrong ".

"-Attributed to Winston Churchill criticizing and satirizing the prescriptivist rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition.

However, due to prescriptivist pressure, some Hungarian speakers incorrectly use-m suffixes on all verbs ending in "- ik ", not just old intransitive ones ( e. g. "* kapaszkodom " instead of " kapaszkodok ", for " I hold on ").

Although most products of verbification are regarded as neologisms, and may meet considerable opposition from prescriptivist authorities, they are very common in colloquial speech, particularly specialized jargon, where words are needed to describe common actions or experiences.

A value-judgment might also have descriptive and emotive meanings, but these are not its primary meaning on a prescriptivist account.

It is because Frege uses definite descriptions in many of his examples that he is often taken to have endorsed the descriptivist theory of names, an attribution made by Saul Kripke.

According to the descriptivist theory of meaning, there is a description of the sense of proper names, and that description, like a definition, picks out the bearer of the name.

Gove's stance was an exemplar of descriptivist linguistics: describing language as it is or has been used.

Other philosophers have argued that Frege is not a descriptivist, and hence that the sense-reference distinction does not solve the problem of fictional names.

So in fact if Frege's view was " descriptivist ", then he effectively agrees with Russell on most of the apparent " proper names " of ordinary language: Frege thinks that " Aristotle " is a name, with a sense, which is equivalent to some description.

And both point to the power that the sense-reference distinction ' does ' have ( i. e., to solve at least the first two problems ), even if it is not given a descriptivist reading.

Kripke thinks that this is a phenomenon that the descriptivist cannot explain.

Conversely, an extreme descriptivist might maintain that there is no such thing as incorrect use.

Expressivists are united in rejecting ethical subjectivism: the descriptivist view that utterances of the type “ X is good / bad ” mean “ I approve / disapprove of X ”.

Subjectivism is a descriptivist theory, not an expressivist one, because it maintains that moral sentences are used to represent facts – namely, facts about the subject ’ s psychological states.

The three lectures that form Naming and Necessity constitute an attack on descriptivist theory of names.

Kripke attributes variants of descriptivist theories to Frege, Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, among others.

According to descriptivist theories, proper names either are synonymous with descriptions, or have their reference determined by virtue of the name's being associated with a description or cluster of descriptions that an object uniquely satisfies.

This makes a sense equivalent to a Russellian description ( see below ), and makes Frege's position " descriptivist ", leaving it prey to a number of difficulties raised against that view.

Thus for most of the twentieth century the " Frege-Russell " descriptivist view was taken as something of an orthodoxy.

Under a descriptivist reading of Frege, sense and reference are probably the same as connotation and denotation.

The notion of rigid designation was first introduced by Saul Kripke in the lectures that became Naming and Necessity, in the course of his argument against descriptivist theories of reference, building on the work of Ruth Barcan Marcus.

* East-Asians are more likely than Americans to have intuitions about reference in line with descriptivist theories.

He claims that the descriptivist limitation-in-principle to classification and organization of data, the " extracting patterns " from a corpus of observed speech and the describing " speech habits " etc.

It is true that this distinction between style and idea often approaches the arbitrary since in the end we must admit that style and content frequently influence or interpenetrate one another and sometimes appear as expressions of the same insight.

Here again laboratory approaches are being evolved, for it is recognized how `` elastic '' these readings can be, how they can apply to many people, and are often stated in general terms all too easily applied to any individual's own case.

In many jurisdictions the approaches of each system are often formal differences in the way cases are reviewed.

However, these approaches are often a matter of national pride and there are opinions amongst jurists about the merits of the differing approaches and their drawbacks as well.

When debates polarise between techniques, the methods are often referred to by a colour code, based on the colours of the bindings of the two volumes from the first Oxford Conference, where the approaches were first distinguished.

Research methods can be classified as falling into one of two approaches, though more recent projects often use techniques from both categories.

Latour suggests that about 90 % of contemporary social criticism in academia displays one of two approaches which he terms “ the fact position and the fairy position .” ( p. 237 ) The fact position is anti-fetishist, arguing that “ objects of belief ” ( e. g., religion, arts ) are merely concepts onto which power is projected ; the “ fairy position ” argues that individuals are dominated, often covertly and without their awareness, by external forces ( e. g., economics, gender ).

Social and cultural factors, emotion, consciousness, animal cognition, comparative and evolutionary approaches are frequently de-emphasized or excluded outright, often based on key philosophical conflicts.

Combinations of approaches two and four are often used in a layered architecture with thin layers of two and thick layers of four.

As a traditionally trained biologist with little mathematical experience, Mayr was often highly critical of early mathematical approaches to evolution such as those of J. B. S.

Though film noir is often identified with a visual style, unconventional within a Hollywood context, that emphasizes low-key lighting and unbalanced compositions, films commonly identified as noir evidence a variety of visual approaches, including ones that fit comfortably within the Hollywood mainstream.

Job-analytic methods are often described as belonging to one of two approaches.

These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory.

As academic language and learning ( ALL ) educators often work with students on improving their approaches to learning, the question then arises: can the results of neuro-scientific studies of brains as they are learning usefully inform practice in this area?

Neoclassical economics is a term variously used for approaches to economics focusing on the determination of prices, outputs, and income distributions in markets through supply and demand, often mediated through a hypothesized maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by cost-constrained firms employing available information and factors of production, in accordance with rational choice theory.

Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, or moras, depending on how rhythm is established, though a language can be influenced by multiple approaches.

Postmodernist approaches therefore often consider the ways in which social dynamics, such as power and hierarchy, affect human conceptualizations of the world to have important effects on the way knowledge is constructed and used.

Postmodernist thought often emphasizes constructivism, idealism, pluralism, relativism, and scepticism in its approaches to knowledge and understanding.

These were precisely the ' urban ills ' Modernism was meant to ' solve ', but more often than not, the types of ' comprehensive ', ' one size fits all ' approaches to planning made things worse., and residents began to show interest in becoming involved in decisions which had once been solely entrusted to professionals of the built environment.

Contemplative approaches may be used in the classroom, especially in tertiary or ( often in modified form ) in secondary education.

Works on grammar were written long before modern syntax came about ; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.

Fluency shaping approaches are often taught in intensive group therapy programs, which may take two to three weeks to complete, but more recently the Camperdown program, using a much shorter schedule, has been shown to be effective.

In contrast to more traditional approaches in economics, scholars of social dynamics are often interested in non-equilibrium, or dynamic, behavior.

Novel approaches to the situation can be seen in Blackadder and Yes Minister, moving what is often a domestic or workplace genre into the corridors of power.